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Digitized  by  the  Internet  Arcinive 

in  2008  with  funding  from 

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oJoackgzoandd  of 
Jc>itezatazey 


3B00h6 


My  Study  Fire 

My  Study  Fire,  Second  Series 

Under  the  Trees  and  Elsewhere 

Short  Studies  in  Literature 

Essays  in  Literary  Interpretation 

Essays  on  Nature  and  Culture 

Essays  on  Books  and  Culture 

Essays  on  Work  and  Culture 

The  Life  of  the  Spirit 

Norse  Stories 

William  Shakespeare 

The  Forest  of  Arden 

A  Child  of  Nature 

Works  and  Days 

Parables  of  Life 

In  Arcady 


o 


^Dackqtoaadd  of 

48, 
B%(im'diono    vVtyht  C/IOahie^ 

SlLudt%ated 

^he  Outlook  Gompan^ 

Copyright,  1903,  by 
The  Outlook  Co. 

Pvhliihed  October,  lOOS 
Reprinted  November,  1003 


THE    DE  VIVN'E    PRESS 


TO 

LAWRENCE   F.  ABBOTT 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

THE  LAKE  COUNTRY  AND  WORDSWORTH         1 


EMERSON  AND  CONCORD 57 

THE  WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY  .     .  99 

WEIMAR  AND  GOETHE 135 

THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE isi 

AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY     ...  195 

THE   LAND   OF  SCOTT 247 


LIST    OF    ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 


Dove  Cottage,  Grasmere Frontispiece 

Honister  Crag  and  Pass 5 

Hawkshead,  where  Wordsworth  went  to  School     ,     .  11 

Kirkstone  Pass 18 

Ullswater 23 

Rydal  Mount 29 

Striding  Edge,  Helvellyn 36 

Langdale  Pikes 41 

Derwentwater 47 

Emerson's  Home  from  the  Orchard 56 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 

The  Great  Meadows 63 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 

The  Pines  of  Walden 69 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 

The  Elms  of  the  Concord  River 76 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 

A  Corner  of  the  Study 81 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 


X  LIST   OF   ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Early  Morning  at  the  Old  Manse 87 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberts 

Walden  Ledge  by  Moonlight 94 

Drawn  by  Elizabeth  Wentworth  Roberta 

Sunnyside 98 

The  Entrance  to  Sleepy  Hollow 103 

On  Sleepy  Hollow  Brook 109 

Old  Willows  near  Tarry  town 115 

Along   Sleepy   Hollow   Brook   on   the   Old    Philipse 

Manor 122 

The  Old  Dutch  Church  in  Sleepy  Hollow  Cemetery  127. 

Goethe's  House 134 

Goethe's  Working-room 141 

The  State  Church  at  Weimar 147 

The  Castle  and  Ducal  Palace 155 

The  Bronze  Serpent  in  the  Park 162 

The  Garden  of  Goethe's  House l67 

A  Corner  in  the  Garden 175 

The  Valley  of  the  Doones 180 

Whitman's   Birthplace 194 

Old  Well  at  Huntington 204 


LIST   OF   ILLUSTRATIONS  xi 

PAGE 

The  Garden  of  Whitman's  House  in  Camden  .     .      .  217 

At  Cold  Spring   Harbor,  where   Whitman   had   his 

First  Glimpse  of  the  Sea 227 

A  Byway  in  Huntington 237 

Whitman's  Grave  at  Camden  ........  241 

Abbotsford 246 

The  Brig  o'  Turk 251 

St.  Margaret's  Loch  and  Arthur's  Seat,  Edinburgh  .  258 

Edinburgh  Castle 26S 

Loch  Achray  and  Ben  Venue 270 

Dryburgh   Abbey 275 

The  Canongate  Tolbooth,  Edinburgh 282 

Loch  Katrine 287 

Melrose  Abbey 294 

The  Quadrangle,  Edinburgh  University     ....  299 


THE  LAKE   COUNTRY 
AND  WORDSWORTH 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 
AND  WORDSWORTH 


He  spoke,  and  loosed  our  hearts  in  tears. 
He  laid  us  as  we  lay  at  birth, 
On  the  cool  flowery  lap  of  earth ; 
Smiles  broke  from  us  and  we  had  ease; 
The  hills  were  round  us,  and  the  breeze 
Went  o'er  the  sunlit  fields  again; 
Our  foreheads  felt  the  wind  and  rain. 
Our  youth  return'd;  for  there  was  shed 
On  spirits  that  had  long  been  dead. 
Spirits  dried  up  and  closely  furl'd. 
The  freshness  of  the  early  world. 

i|0  wrote  Matthew  Arnold  in 
1850,  when  the  long  life  of 
Wordsworth  ended  and  he 
was  laid  at  rest  in  the 
churchyard  at  Grasmere, 
the  Rotha  sweeping  past  his 
grave  with  the  freshness 
and    purity    of    the    mountains    in    its    bosom. 

3 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

Half  a  century  has  passed  since  the  bells  in 
the  old  square  tower  tolled  on  that  memor- 
able day,  but  the  peace  with  which  the  poet 
touched  the  fevered  life  of  the  century  has  not 
lost  its  healing,  nor  has  his  message  lost  its 
power.  There  are  still  differences  of  opinion 
concerning  minor  points  in  his  work,  but  his 
genius  is  no  longer  questioned ;  and  his  art,  in  its 
best  moments,  has  won  complete  recognition. 
Some  foreign  critics,  it  is  true,  have  doubted  and 
even  sneered;  but  one  of  the  most  valuable  of 
recent  contributions  to  the  large  literature 
which  has  grown  up  about  Wordsworth  comes 
from  the  hand  of  a  very  intelligent  and  sympa- 
thetic French  critic.  It  is  safe  to  say  that,  in  the 
settled  opinion  of  this  country  and  of  England, 
Wordsworth  gave  the  world  between  1798  and 
1815  work  that  has  enriched  English  poetry  for 
all  time  both  in  substance  and  in  form.  For 
this  poetry  had  not  only  a  new  music  for  the  ear 
which  made  men  think  suddenly  of  mountain 
brooks;  it  had  also  a  new  view  of  nature  and  a 
new  conception  of  life. 

A  poet  so  freighted  with  spiritual  insight, 
with  meditative  habit,  and  with  moral  fervor,  is 

4 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

always  in  danger  of  straining  his  art  and  dissi- 
pating its  magic  in  the  endeavor  to  produce 
ethical  results;  and  a  touch  of  didacticism  ban- 
ishes the  bloom  and  dissolves  the  spell.  There 
was  in  Wordsworth  a  natural  stiffness  of  mind 
which  showed  itself  more  distinctly  as  time  im- 
paired the  vivacity  of  his  moods  and  the  fresh- 
ness of  his  imagination.  He  was,  by  instinct 
and  the  habit  of  a  lifetime,  a  moralist ;  and  there 
were  times  when  he  came  perilously  near  being 
a  preacher  in  verse.  He  was,  as  often  happens, 
radically  unlike  the  popular  impression  of  him; 
he  and  Keats  have  been  widely  and  astonish- 
ingly misunderstood.  One  constantly  comes 
upon  expressions  of  the  feeling  that  Words- 
worth had  the  calmness  of  the  philosophic  tem- 
per, and  that  he  was  by  nature  self -poised  and 
cold ;  and  this  in  the  face  of  the  fact  that  one  of 
the  great  qualities  of  his  verse  is  its  passion! 
Wordsworth  was,  by  nature,  headstrong,  ar- 
dent, passionate,  with  great  capacity  for  emo- 
tion and  suffering ;  the  sorrows  of  his  life  shook 
him  as  an  oak  is  shaken  by  a  tempest,  and  years 
afterward,  when  he  referred  to  the  deaths  of  his 
children  or  of  his  brother,  his  emotion  was  pain- 

7 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

ful  to  look  upon.  He  bore  himself  with  a  noble 
fortitude  through  the  trials  and  disappoint- 
ments of  his  long  career ;  but  that  fortitude  was 
won  through  struggle.  He  had  a  stubborn  will, 
which  became  inflexible  when  a  principle  was 
involved;  he  passed  through  a  great  spiritual 
crisis  when  the  French  Revolution  first  liber- 
ated and  then  blasted  the  hopes  of  ardent  and 
generous  spirits  in  Europe;  he  sought  seclusion 
and  maintained  it  to  the  end;  he  was  rejected 
and  derided  by  the  great  majority  of  those  who 
made  literary  opinion  during  his  youth  and  ma- 
turity ;  and  his  verse  brought  him  no  returns,  al- 
though he  had  both  the  need  and  the  wholesome 
desire  for  adequate  payment  for  honorable 
work. 

All  these  and  other  conditions  told  against 
the  free  development  of  the  pure  poetic  quality 
in  Wordsworth's  nature,  and  against  that  spon- 
taneity which  is  the  source  of  natural  magic  in 
poetry.  It  is  not  surprising  that  he  wrote  so 
much  didactic  verse;  it  is  surprising  that  he 
wrote  so  much  poetry  of  surpassing  charm  and 
beauty.  When  all  deductions  are  made  from 
his  work,  there  remains  a  body  of  poetry  large 

8 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

enough  and  beautiful  enough  to  place  the  poet 
among  the  greatest  of  English  singers.  At  his 
best  no  one  has  more  of  that  magic  which  lends 
to  thought  the  enchantment  of  a  melody  that 
seems  to  flow  out  of  its  heart  as  the  brook  runs 
shining  and  singing  out  of  the  heart  of  the  hills. 
No  English  poet  has  command  of  a  purer 
music,  and  none  has  more  to  say  to  the  spirit ;  he 
speaks  to  the  ear,  to  the  imagination,  to  the  in- 
tellect, and  to  the  soul  of  his  fellows.  He  was 
always  high-minded,  devoted  to  his  work,  stain- 
less in  all  his  relations;  during  fifteen  golden 
years  he  was  so  in  tune  with  Nature  that  she 
breathed  through  him  as  the  wind  breathes 
through  the  harp,  and  the  deep  silence  of  the 
hills  became  a  haunting  music  in  his  verse,  and 
the  inarticulate  murmur  of  the  mountain 
streams  a  reconciling  and  restful  melody  to 
tired  spirits  and  sorrow-smitten  hearts.  Such 
a  life  is  a  spiritual  achievement;  add  to  it  a 
noble  body  of  poetry,  and  the  measure  of 
Wordsworth's  greatness  and  service  becomes 
more  clear,  although  that  measure  has  not  yet 
been  finally  taken. 

In  this  poetry  Nature  is  not  only  presented 
9 


THE  LAKE   COUNTRY 

in  every  aspect,  but  is  interpreted  in  a  way 
which  was  in  effect  a  revelation.  It  is  true, 
poets  as  far  back  as  Lucretius  had  conceived  of 
Nature  as  a  whole,  and  had  felt  and  expressed 
the  inspiration  which  flowed  from  this  great 
conception;  but  Wordsworth  was  the  first  poet 
in  whose  imagination  this  view  of  the  world 
was  completely  mastered  and  assimilated;  the 
first  poet  who  adequately  presented  Nature, 
not  only  as  a  vast  unity  of  form  and  life,  but 
as  a  sublime  symbol;  the  first  poet  who  suc- 
ceeded in  blending  the  life  of  man  with  Nature 
with  such  spiritual  insight  that  the  deeper  corre- 
spondences between  the  two  were  brought  into 
clear  view,  and  their  subtle  and  secret  relations 
indicated.  He  is  constantly  spoken  of  as  pre- 
eminently the  poet  of  Nature,  because  in  no 
other  English  verse  does  Nature  fill  so  vast  a 
place  as  in  his  poetry;  but  he  was  even  more 
distinctly  the  poet  of  the  spirit  of  man,  discern- 
ing everj^vhere  in  Nature  those  spiritual  forces 
and  verities  which  came  to  consciousness  in  his 
own  soul,  and  those  hints  and  suggestions  of 
spiritual  truth  which  found  in  his  own  spirit  an 
interpreter. 

10 


Hawkshead,  where  Wordsworth  went  to  School 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

It  was  inevitable  that  a  poetry  of  Nature 
which  was,  at  bottom,  a  poetry  of  life,  with  Na- 
ture as  a  background,  a  symbol,  a  spiritual  en- 
ergy, a  living  environment,  should  have  its 
roots  deep  in  the  soil  and  should  reflect,  not 
general  impressions  of  a  universe,  but  aspects, 
glimpses,  views  of  a  world  close  at  hand.  In 
art  great  conceptions  are  successfully  presented 
only  when  they  find  forms  so  beautiful  and  in- 
evitable that  the  thought  seems  born  in  the 
form  as  the  soul  is  lodged  in  the  body;  not  con- 
ditioned by  it,  but  so  much  a  part  of  it  that  it 
cannot  be  localized,  and  so  pervasive  that  it 
irradiates  and  spiritualizes  every  part.  In  like 
manner,  in  his  best  moments,  Wordsworth  fills 
our  vision  with  the  beauty  of  some  actual  scene 
or  place  before  he  opens  the  imagination  by 
natural  and  inevitable  dilation  to  some  great 
poetic  idea.  In  the  noble  "  Lines  written  above 
Tintern  Abbey,"  in  which  his  imagination  rises 
to  a  great  height  and  his  diction  rises  with  it  on 
even  wing,  we  are  first  made  to  see  with  mar- 
velous distinctness  the  steep  and  lonely  cliffs, 
the  dark  sycamore,  the  orchard-tufts,  the 
hedge-rows — "  little  lines  of  sportive  wood  run 

13 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

wild " — the  pastoral  farms  and  wreaths  of 
smoke,  before  we  are  brought  under  the  spell 

of 

That   serene   and   blessed   mood, 
In  which  the  affections  lead  us  on, 

and  we  become  living  souls  and  see  into  the 
heart  of  things.  In  like  manner  the  great  Ode 
rises  from  familiar  things — the  rose,  the  moon, 
the  birds,  the  lamb,  the  sweet,  homely  sights  and 
sounds — to  that  sublime  height  from  which  the 
whole  sweep  and  range  of  life  become  visible. 
And  the  lover  of  Wordsworth  who  recalls  the 
Highland  girl,  the  dancing  daffodils,  and  a 
hundred  other  imperishable  figures  and  scenes, 
knows  with  what  unerring  instinct  the  poet  fas- 
tens upon  the  familiar  and  near  when  he  pur- 
poses to  flash  into  the  imagination  the  highest 
truths. 

Wordsworth's  poetry  has  a  singular  unity 
and  consistency;  from  beginning  to  end  it  is 
bound  together  not  only  by  great  ideas  which 
continually  reappear,  but  it  is  harmonized  by  a 
background  which  remains  unchanged  from 
stage  to  stage.  This  double  unity  was  made 
possible  by  the  good  fortune  of  a  lifelong  resi- 

14 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

dence  in  the  Lake  Country.  With  the  excep- 
tion of  the  years  at  Cambridge,  when  he  was 
a  student  in  St.  John's  College,  and  later  in 
London  and  Dorsetshire,  and  of  occasional 
visits  to  the  Continent,  the  poet  spent  his  whole 
life  almost  within  sight  of  Skiddaw  and  Hel- 
vellyn.  In  childhood,  youth,  maturity,  and  age 
he  saw  the  same  noble  masses  of  mountain,  the 
same  sleeping  or  moving  surfaces  of  water;  he 
heard  the  same  music  of  running  streams  and 
the  same  deep  harmonies  of  tempests  among 
the  hills.  The  sources  of  his  poetry  were  in  his 
own  nature,  but  its  scenery,  its  incidents,  its 
occasions,  are,  with  few  exceptions,  to  be  found 
in  the  Lake  Country.  No  one  can  catch  all  the 
tones  of  his  verse  who  has  not  heard  the  rush 
of  wind  and  the  notes  of  hidden  streams  in  that 
beautiful  region;  no  one  can  fully  possess  the 
rich  and  splendid  atmosphere  which  gathers 
about  his  greater  passages  who  has  not  seen  the 
unsearchable  glory  of  the  sunset  when  the  up- 
per Vales  are  filled  with  a  mist  which  is  trans- 
formed into  such  effulgence  of  light  as  never  yet 
came  "within  the  empire  of  any  earthly  pencil." 
In  a  word,  the  poetry  of  Wordsworth  is  rooted 

15 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

in  the  Lake  Country  as  truly  as  the  other 
flora  of  that  region;  and  the  spirit  and  quahty 
of  the  landscape  not  only  come  to  the  surface 
in  separate  poems  and  in  detached  lines,  but 
penetrate  and  irradiate  the  whole  body  of  his 
verse. 

The  poet  was  born  at  Cockermouth,  on  the  7th 
of  April,  1770,  the  second  son  of  John  Words- 
worth, law  agent  of  the  Earl  of  Lonsdale.  The 
town  is  in  the  northeastern  part  of  the  Lake 
region,  not  many  miles  from  the  English  Chan- 
nel, and  within  sound  of  the  water  of  the  Der- 
went.  On  the  main  street  of  the  old  market 
town  stands  the  plain,  substantial,  two-storied 
house,  spacious  and  comfortable,  in  which  Wil- 
liam and  Dorothy  were  born ;  for  the  two  names 
ought  never  to  be  separated,  the  sister's  pas- 
sionate devotion  and  genius  contributing  not 
only  to  the  brother's  growth  and  comfort,  but 
to  his  work.  To  the  south  rises  the  castle,  half 
in  ruins;  about  are  soft,  grassy  hills.  The 
garden  at  the  back  of  tlie  house,  with  its  hedges 
and  the  river  murmuring  near,  was  the  play- 
ground of  the  children.    There  flowers  bloomed 

16 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

and  birds  built  safelj^  and  the  days  went  by  in 
a  deep  and  beautiful  calm: 

Stay  near  me :  do  not  take  thy  flight ! 
A  little  longer  stay   in   sight ! 
Much  converse  do  I  find  in  thee, 
Historian  of  my  infancy ! 
Float  near  me:  do  not  yet  depart. 
Dead  times  revive  in  thee: 
Thou  bring'st,  gay  creature  as  thou  art ! 
A  solemn  image  to  my  heart, 
My  father's  family ! 

Oh!  pleasant,  pleasant  were  the  days. 
The  time,  when,  in  our  childish  plays, 
My   sister  Emmeline  and   I 
Together  chased  the  butterfly! 
A  very  hunter  did  I  rush 
Upon  the  prey;  with  leaps  and  springs 
I  followed  on  from  brook  to  bush; 
But  she,  God  love  her!  feared  to  brush 
The   dust   from   off  its   wings. 

In  the  "  Prelude  "  Wordsworth  has  left  to 
the  world  a  unique  autobiography;  a  human 
document  of  the  highest  interest.  In  this  story 
of  his  poetic  life  the  landscape  of  his  physical 
life  is  reflected  in  almost  numberless  glimpses, 
from  his  childhood  to  those  rich  years  at  Gras- 

19 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

mere.  In  this  meditative,  descriptive  poem,  as 
in  a  quiet  stream,  his  childliood  and  youth  are 
preserved,  and  we  are  enabled  to  note  the  scenes 
and  incidents  which  left  their  permanent  im- 
press on  his  memory.  Under  the  northwest 
tower  of  the  Castle  at  Cockermouth  the  Der- 
went  runs  swift  and  deep,  and  sweeps  tumultu- 
ously  over  the  blue-gray  gravel  of  the  shallows 
which  spread  out  from  the  bank  opposite.  The 
boy  never  forgot  this  striking  effect,  and  years 
after  he  wrote  of 

.  .   .  the    shadow    of   those   towers 
That  yet  survive,  a  shattered  monument 
Of  feudal  sway,  the  bright  blue  river  passed 
Along  the  margin  of  our  terrace  walk. 

Standing  in  the  garden  at  the  back  of  the 
house,  he  saw  constantly  the  footpath  that  led 
from  the  ford  over  the  rocky  brow  of  a  neigh- 
boring hill ;  and  that  worn  line  of  human  travel 
became  a  highway  to  his  imagination: 

...  a  disappearing  line, 
One  daily  present  to  my  eyes,  that  crossed 
The  naked  summit  of  a  far-off  hill 
Beyond  the  limits  that  my  feet  had  trod, 
Was  like  an  invitation  into  space 
Boundless,  or  guide  into  eternity. 

20 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

In  1778  the  boy  was  sent  to  the  Grammar 
School  at  Hawkshead,  foimded  by  Archbishop 
Sandys  in  1585,  at  that  memorable  time  when 
William  Shakespeare,  escaping  from  the  tasks 
of  the  Stratford  Grammar  School  and  the  quiet 
which  broods  along  the  banks  of  the  slow-mov- 
ing Avon,  had  gone  up  to  London  to  seek  and 
find  the  greatest  fortune  of  literary  opportu- 
nity and  fame  which  has  yet  come  in  the  way  of 
mortal  man.  The  school  is  still  largely  un- 
changed ;  there  is  a  spacious  room  on  the  ground 
floor  where  the  ancient  hum  of  industrious  boys 
is  still  heard ;  there  is  a  small  library  made  up  of 
gifts  from  the  students,  each  pupil  presenting 
a  volume  when  he  leaves  the  school.  The  names 
of  the  Masters  are  preserved  on  a  tablet  in  this 
room,  and  in  an  oaken  chest  the  original  charter 
of  the  school  is  kept.  The  old  oak  benches  in 
the  lower  room  bear  witness  to  the  traditional 
activity  of  the  jack-knife,  and  "  W.  Words- 
worth "  is  cut  deeply  in  the  wood.  Here  the 
boy  worked  at  his  books  for  eight  happy  years ; 
boarding,  as  was  the  custom  of  the  place,  with 
a  village  dame — Anne  Tyson — for  whom  he 
came  to  have  a  deep  and  lasting  affection.    The 

21 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

house  in  which  she  lived,  like  its  fellows  in  the 
village,  is  small  and  unpretentious.  The  village 
lies  in  the  beautiful  country  between  Winder- 
mere and  Coniston  Water,  with  Esthwaite 
Water  close  at  hand.  It  is  a  quaint  old  market 
town,  with  narrow  streets,  low  archways,  houses 
with  many-paned  windows;  the  old  church 
dominating  the  place: 

The  snow-white  church  upon  the  hill 
Sits  like  a  throned  lady,  sending  out 
A  gracious  look  all  over  her  domain. 

The  "  Prelude  "  lingers  long  over  the  scenes, 
incidents,  and  experiences  of  the  eight  years  at 
Hawkshead;  and  it  would  be  quite  impossible 
to  find  a  locality  more  nobly  planned  for  the 
imfolding  and  enrichment  of  a  poet's  imagina- 
tion. The  lover  of  Wordsworth  can  still  feel 
something  of  the  spell  which  was  laid  upon  the 
boy  in  those  golden  days  of  fresh  and  aspiring 
youth.  The  teaching  which  the  school  gave 
was,  for  its  time,  admirable;  but  the  deepest 
education  was  gained  out  of  school  hours,  and, 
largely,  out  of  doors.  The  memory  of  those 
years  was  always  fresh  and  grateful : 

22 


~'f-»  l    c 


AND  WORDSWORTH 

Well  do  I  call  to  mind  the  very  week 
When  I  was  first  intrusted  to  the  care 
Of  that  sweet  Valley. 

The  "  Prelude  "  makes  us  aware  of  the  spir- 
itual richness  and  growth  of  these  school  days; 
of  the  joy  of  reading  and  the  deeper  joy  of 
seeing;  of  long  walks  of  exploration;  of  silent 
hours  upon  Esthwaite,  or,  in  vacation,  upon 
Windermere,  when  the  deep  and  solemn  beauty 
of  mountain  and  star  sank  into  his  heart : 

Dear  native  Regions,  wheresoe'er  shall  close 
My  mortal  course,  there  will  I  think  on  you ; 
Dying,  will  cast  on  you  a  backward  look; 
Even  as  this  setting  sun  (albeit  the  Vale 
Is  nowhere  touched  by  one  memorial  gleam) 
Doth  with  the  fond  remains  of  his  last  power 
Still  linger,  and  a  farewell  luster  sheds 
On  the  dear  mountain-tops  where  first  he  rose. 

Within  easy  walking  distance  one  comes 
upon  some  of  the  most  impressive  or  enchant- 
ing scenery  of  the  Lake  Country.  Winder- 
mere, with  its  group  of  mountains;  the  striking 
lines  of  the  Langdale  Pikes,  and  other  peaks, 
crowd  the  horizon  in  all  directions.  To  the 
west,  over  the  hill,  through  lovely  stretches  of 

25 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

meadow  or  across  the  moorland,  lies  Conis- 
ton  Water,  with  the  massive  front  of  Coniston 
Old  Man  rising  across  the  quiet  lake.  One 
cannot  look  down  on  that  exquisite  Valley  with- 
out thinking  of  Brantwood,  and  of  the  last  of 
the  group  of  great  writers  who  were  contempo- 
raneous with  Wordsworth's  later  years. 

The  leisure  hours  of  that  happy  time  were 
not,  however,  wholly  given  over  to  wandering 
and  solitude;  there  was  companionship  with 
books  as  well: 

Of  my  earliest  days  at  school  [writes  the  poet] 
I  have  little  to  say,  but  that  they  were  very  happy 
ones,  chiefly  because  I  was  left  at  liberty  there,  and 
in  the  vacations,  to  read  whatever  books  I  liked.  For 
example,  I  read  all  Fielding's  works,  Don  Quixote,  Gil 
Bias,  and  any  part  of  Swift  that  I  liked,  Gulliver's 
Travels  and  The  Tale  of  a  Tub  being  both  much  to 
my  taste.  It  may  be,  perhaps,  as  well  to  mention  that 
the  first  verses  which  I  wrote  were  a  task  imposed  by 
my  master — the  subject.  The  Summer  Vacation ;  and 
of  my  own  accord  I  added  others  upon  Return  to 
School.  There  was  nothing  remarkable  in  either  poem  ; 
but  I  was  called  upon,  among  other  scholars,  to  write 
verses  upon  the  completion  of  the  second  centenary 
from  the  foundation  of  the  school  in  1585  by  Arch- 
bishop  Sandys.      These  verses  were  much  admired — 

26 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

far  more  than  they  deserved,  for  they  were  but  a  tame 
imitation  of  Pope's  versification,  and  a  little  in  his 
style. 

The  real  education  of  the  boy — the  libera- 
tion of  his  imagination  and  the  unfolding  of 
his  spiritual  nature — was  gained,  however,  in 
the  woods  and  fields  and  upon  the  quiet  lakes. 
Esthwaite,  Windermere,  and  Winander,  and 
the  mountains  which  encircled  them  and  made 
them  a  world  by  themselves,  were  his  most  po- 
tent teachers.  Here,  in  boyhood,  he  began  to 
reveal  that  union  of  exact  observation  with 
imaginative  insight  which  was  to  give  his  po- 
etry vividness  of  pictorial  effect  and  depth  of 
spiritual  suggestion.  He  learned  both  to  see 
the  object  upon  which  his  eye  rested,  and  also, 
by  a  sudden  extension  of  vision,  to  discern  its 
significance  in  that  invisible  order  of  which  all 
things  seen  are  but  types  and  symbols.  And 
out  of  this  clarity  and  range  of  vision  there 
came  the  double  beauty  of  his  verse :  the  beauty 
of  the  flower  or  tree  or  landscape  suddenly  and 
vividly  presented  to  the  imagination,  and  the 
beauty  of  the  great  world  of  earth  and  sky 
which  enfolds  flower  and  tree  and  landscape; 

27 


THE  LAKE   COUNTRY 

the  beauty  of  the  daffodil  dancing  along  the 

margin  of  the  bay,  and  that  other  beauty  which 

flashes  upon 

.   .   .  that   inward   eye 
Which  is  the  bliss  of  soHtude. 

In  October,  1787,  Wordsworth  left  the  Lake 
Country  for  the  first  time  and  took  up  his  resi- 
dence in  the  southwestern  corner  of  the  first 
quadrangle  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge. 
Here  he  found  another  kind  of  beauty:  the 
beauty  of  low-lying  fields,  of  streams  that  run 
through  marshes  to  the  sea,  of  low,  veiled  skies. 
Here,  too,  was  the  ripe  loveliness  of  an  ancient 
seat  of  learning;  and  here,  above  all,  were  the 
richest  traditions  and  associations  of  English 
poetry.  Those  glorious  windows  and  noble 
roofs  which  Milton  loved  so  well  AVords worth 
loved  also,  and  from  those  dark  carven  seats 
where  one  sits  to-day  under  the  spell  of  choral 
singing  of  almost  angelic  sweetness  he  doubtless 
searched,  with  reverent  gaze, 

That  branching  roof 
Self-poised,  and  scooped  into  ten  thousand  cells 
Where  light  and  shade  repose,  where  music  dwells 

28 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

Lingering,  and  wandering  on  as  loth  to  die — 
Like  thoughts  whose  very  sweetness  yieldeth  proof 
That  they  were  born   for  immortahty. 

Having  taken  his  Bachelor's  degree  in  Janu- 
ary, 1791,  Wordsworth  went  up  to  London, 
uncertain  as  to  his  future  vocation.  Every 
reader  of  his  poetry  knows  how  vividly  he  saw 
certain  things  in  London — the  thrush  that  sang 
on  Wood  Street,  and  by  the  magic  of  its  notes 
made  poor  Susan  suddenly  aware  of  trees 
and  mountains,  of  rolling  vapor  and  running 
streams;  and  that  noble  vision  from  Westmin- 
ster Bridge;  but  the  great  city  touched  him 
mainly  as  it  reminded  him  of  things  remote 
from  its  turmoil  and  alien  to  its  mighty  rush 
and  war  of  strife  and  toil.  In  November  of  the 
same  year  he  landed  in  France,  at  the  very  mo- 
ment when  the  hopes  of  humanity  were  still  full 
winged  on  their  sublimest  flight;  hopes  so  soon 
to  fall,  maimed  and  bruised,  to  the  earth  whence 
they  had  risen  with  such  exultant  joy.  The 
spiritual  crisis  through  which  the  ardent  young 
poet  passed  lies  outside  the  scope  of  this  article ; 
it  may  be  said  in  passing,  however,  that  those 
who  are  tempted  to  make  the  usual  common- 

31 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

place  comments  on  his  subsequent  change  of 
attitude  will  do  well  to  study  first  the  tempera- 
ment of  one  whose  nature  had  a  kind  of  ocean- 
like capacity  for  emotion,  and  whose  convictions 
were  born  in  absolute  integrity  of  thought.  The 
world  would  not  willingly  lose  Browning's  strik- 
ing lines  on  "  The  Lost  Leader  ";  but  the  world 
is  glad  to  remember  that  the  younger  poet,  with 
characteristic  candor,  in  later  and  wiser  years 
disclaimed  his  interpretation  of  the  older  poet's 
course. 

In  1795  Wordsworth  made  his  first  homef 
at  Racedown,  in  Dorsetshire.  His  sister  joined 
him,  and  that  beautiful  companionship,  which 
was  to  be  one  of  the  prime  sources  of  his  in- 
spiration, brought  him  calmness  and  hope  af- 
ter months  of  darkness  and  discouragement. 
Here  began  that  long  career  which  was  not 
only  to  develop  poetic  genius  of  a  high  order, 
but  to  illustrate  a  devotion  to  the  things  of 
the  spirit  so  nobly  sustained  that  the  history 
of  literature  hardly  affords  its  parallel.  The 
beginnings  were  not  very  promising;  the  poet 
seemed  to  need  the  touch  of  some  quicker  mind 
than  his  own.     The  impulse  came  two  years 

32 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

later  when  Coleridge  became  the  guest  of  the 
quiet  household,  and  in  one  of  the  long  walks 
in  which  the  two  poets  and  Dorothy  Words- 
worth found  such  delight,  the  "Ancient  Mar- 
iner "  was  planned.  In  the  autumn  of  the  fol- 
lowing year  a  new  date  was  made  in  English 
literature  by  the  appearance  of  the  "Lyrical 
Ballads."  To  that  slender  volume  Wordsworth 
contributed  both  his  weakness  and  his  strength; 
it  contained  "Goody  Blake"  and  "The  Idiot 
Boy,"  but  it  also  contained  "Expostulation  and 
Reply  "  and  "  The  Tables  Turned."  Above  all, 
it  gave  the  world  the  "Lines  written  above  Tin- 
tern  Abbey,"  in  which  the  genius  of  the  poet 
touched  its  highest  reach  of  insight  and  power. 
The  poet  was  now  on  the  threshold  of  his 
great  career;  there  were  before  him  fifteen 
years  in  which  the  breath  of  inspiration  touched 
him  again  and  again,  and  he  sang  with  the  mag- 
ical ease  of  the  bird;  after  this  productive  dec- 
ade and  a  half  the  glow  slowly  faded,  the  spell 
was  broken,  the  magic  lost.  At  the  very  begin- 
ning of  this  epoch  in  his  spiritual  and  artistic 
growth,  Wordsworth,  with  his  sister,  returned 
to   the   Lake   Country,   from   which   he   never 

33 


THE   LAKE   COUXTRY 

again  departed  save  for  brief  journeys  or  visits. 
In  the  very  heart  of  that  lovely  region  he  found 
the  home  of  his  genius  and  of  his  affections. 
"To  be  at  Grasmere,"  wrote  Dorothy,  "is  like 
being  at  a  natural  church.  To  spend  one's  holi- 
day there  is  like  having  a  week  of  Sundays." 
And  now,  nearly  a  century  later,  the  Vale  still 
keeps  its  ancient  silence  despite  the  tide  of 
travel  which  follows  the  highways.  One  may 
stand  to-day  in  the  ancient  churchyard  and  feel 
the  peace  of  the  landscape  enfolding  him  as  it 
enfolded  Wordsworth.  The  latest  poet  to  cele- 
brate the  sacred  associations  of  the  place  has 
not  missed  the  repose  which  the  older  poet  loved 
so  well: 

Afar  though   nation   be  on  nation   hurled, 

And  hfe  with  toil  and  ancient  pain  depressed, 

Here  one  may  scarce  believe  the  whole  wide  world 
Is  not  at  peace;  and  all  men's  hearts  at  rest. 

In  December,  1799,  when  the  Wordsworths 
took  possession  of  Dove  Cottage,  the  tiny,  blue- 
gray  stone  house  was  almost  without  neigh- 
bors, and  the  lake  lay  before  it  like  a  mirror; 
to-day  it  is  part  of  a  small  but  compactly  built 
village.    It  faces  tlie  lake,  which  is  but  a  short 

34) 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

distance  from  its  door;  there  is  a  small  orchard 
and  garden  at  the  back,  so  rich  in  foliage  that 
it  is  like  a  fragrant  bower ;  the  spring  still  over- 
flows in  its  little  bowl ;  the  rocks,  overhung  with 
vines,  rise  abruptly  from  the  natural  seat  which 
Coleridge  cut  for  Wordsworth ;  and  the  outlines 
of  the  house  are  almost  invisible,  so  rich  are  the 
masses  of  vine  and  foliage  which  have  over- 
grown and  enriched  it.  Nature  has  taken  the 
Cottage  into  her  own  keeping  and  made  it 
part  of  the  landscape.  The  elder-tree  which 
once  hung  its  blossoms  near  the  little  porch  has 
gone,  but  a  profusion  of  wild  flowers  obliterates 
all  traces  of  its  loss.  Through  a  tiny  vestibule 
the  visitor  enters  the  largest  room  in  the  house, 
and  is  amazed  to  find  it  so  small;  for  the  great- 
ness of  the  poetry  with  which  the  Cottage  is 
associated  somehow  affects  the  image  one  has 
unconsciously  made  of  it.  Sixteen  feet  long 
and  twelve  broad,  with  dark  oak  wainscoting 
from  floor  to  ceiling,  a  large  fireplace,  lighted 
by  a  cottage  window  embowered  in  jasmine — 
this  was  the  place  where  Wordsworth  received 
his  friends,  and  where,  far  into  the  night,  Cole- 
ridge's magical  voice  went  sounding  the  deeps 

37 


THE  LAKE   COUNTRY 

of  thought.  Climbing  the  narrow  stairs,  one 
comes  to  a  tiny  room  where  the  poet  kept  his 
books  and  where  he  often  wrote;  his  study  was, 
however,  out-of-doors.  In  the  httle  guest- 
rooms Coleridge,  Scott,  De  Quincey  slept.  In 
one  of  these  rooms  Coleridge  first  read  "Chris- 
tabel "  to  Wordsworth ;  there  Dorothy  and 
Coleridge  often  talked  until  the  stars  began 
to  fade.  "  Every  sight  and  sound  reminds  me 
of  Coleridge,"  wrote  Dorothy  in  later  years; 
"  dear,  dear  fellow — of  his  many  talks  to  us, 
by  day  and  night — of  all  dear  things."  In  the 
house,  or  about  it,  gather  some  of  the  richest 
traditions  of  English  literature.  That  marvel- 
ous boy.  Hartley  Coleridge,  played  in  the  gar- 
den; the  small  figure  of  the  "Opium  Eater," 
with  his  dark,  expressive  face,  was  often  seen 
in  the  same  garden  which,  years  later,  was  to 
be  the  silent  witness  of  his  own  strange  strug- 
gles; within  the  shelter  of  this  orchard-garden, 
too,  Southey  read  aloud  "Thalaba";  here  Sir 
Humphry  Davy  brought  not  only  his  fame  but 
his  unfailing  charm  of  gracious  manners  and 
gayety  of  spirits;  and  here  the  Magician  of  the 
North  wove  those  ancient  spells  which  none  who 

38 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

came  near  enough  to  understand  his  noble  na- 
ture ever  escaped.  On  a  memorable  day  in 
1805,  Davy,  Scott,  and  Wordsworth  climbed 
the  long  and  rugged  ascent  of  Helvellyn — 

Old   Helvellyn's  brow. 
Where  once  together,  in  his  days  of  strength, 
We  stood  rejoicing  as  if  earth  were  free 
From  sorrow,  hke  the  sky  above  our  heads. 

No  presence,  however  great,  lends  such 
beauty  and  dignity  to  Dove  Cottage  as  Doro- 
thy Wordsworth  gave  it  out  of  the  richness 
and  nobility  of  her  rare  nature.  Here  she 
showed,  as  in  a  parable,  the  imperishable  sweet- 
ness of  self -forgetful  love;  here,  in  lifelong 
devotion,  she  poured  out  the  treasures  of  her 
mind  and  heart  for  the  enrichment  of  one  who, 
without  the  warmth  of  affection,  the  quick  sym- 
pathy, the  fruitful  suggestiveness  she  gave  him, 
would  have  been  poor  indeed,  with  all  his  later 

fame: 

The  blessing  of  my  later  years 
Was  with  me  when  I  was  a  boy; 
She  gave  me  eyes,  she  gave  me  ears, 
And  humble  cares,  and  delicate  fears, 
A  heart,  the  fountain  of  sweet  tears, 
And  love,  and  joy,  and  thought. 

39 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

To  this  cottage  came,  later,  the  wife  who 
was  to  widen  without  impairing  the  circle  of 
comprehension  and  devotion  which  wove  about 
the  poet  a  magical  barrier  against  the  coldness 
of  the  world.  No  man  of  genius  ever  owed 
more  to  women  than  Wordsworth,  and  none 
has  more  richly  repaid  their  devotion;  for  none 
has  interpreted  the  finest  qualities  of  woman- 
hood with  greater  purity  of  insight.  The  most 
magnificent  compliment  ever  paid  to  a  woman 
was  penned  by  Shakespeare,  whose  genius  is 
never  more  searching  in  its  insight  or  felicitous 
in  phrase  than  when  it  deals  with  ideal  women; 
but  Wordsworth's  tributes  to  the  highest  quali- 
ties of  womanhood  are  unsurpassed  in  delicacy 
and  dignity.  Who  has  ever  spoken  of  woman 
with  a  finer  instinct  than  the  poet  who  wrote: 

And  she  hath  smiles  to  earth  unknown ; 
Smiles,  that  with  motion  of  their  own 
Do  spread,  and  sink,  and  rise; 
That  come  and  go  with  endless  play, 
And  ever,  as  they  pass  away, 
Are  hidden  in  her  eyes. 

But  Dove  Cottage  was  but  a  personal  shelter 
in  a  country  which,  in  its  entirety,  was  the  home 

40 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

of  Wordsworth's  genius.  "  This  is  the  place 
where  he  keeps  his  books,"  said  a  servant  to 
the  visitor  at  Rydal  Mount;  "his  study  is  out- 
of-doors."  From  1798  to  the  hour  of  his 
death  in  1850  the  poet  lived  in  the  larger  world 
which  spread  from  his  door  to  the  horizon.  He 
knew  every  path,  summit,  glen,  ravine,  outlook 
in  that  country;  he  was  on  intimate  terms  with 
every  flower,  tree,  bird;  he  saw  the  most  deli- 
cate and  elusive  play  of  expression  on  the  face 
of  that  world,  the  shy  motions  of  its  most  fugi- 
tive life;  he  heard  every  sound  which  issued 
from  it.  One  has  to  walk  but  a  little  way  from 
the  cottage  to  see,  spread  before  him,  the  ma- 
jesty and  loveliness  of  that  landscape.  The  old 
road  from  Grasmere  to  Ambleside,  which 
Wordsworth  haunted  not  only  with  his  pres- 
ence but  with  the  murmured  tones  of  his  verse, 
climbs  the  near  hill,  and  there  lies  the  vaster 
world! — the  little  blue-gray  village  of  Gras- 
mere, at  the  head  of  the  lake  on  the  right,  with 
the  great  mass  of  Helvellyn  towering  behind  it ; 
stretches  of  green  meadows  fringing  green 
waters;  the  solitary  island  with  its  pines;  Sil- 
verhorn  and  Helmcrag;  the  ridge  of  Lough- 

43 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

rigg,  where  the  poet  loved  to  walk;  and,  on  the 
left,  Rydal  Water  set  like  a  jewel  among  the 
hills. 

Between  December,  1799,  and  May,  1808, 
while  the  Wordsworths  were  living  in  Dove 
Cottage,  the  poet  composed  "  Michael,"  "  The 
Cuckoo,"  "  The  Wanderer,"  "  The  Leech-ga- 
therer," "  The  Butterfly  " — which  describes  the 
orchard-garden — "  The  Daisy,"  "  Alice  Fell," 
"The  Beggars,"  the  "Ode  to  Duty,"  "The 
Waggoner,"  "  The  Character  of  the  Happy 
Warrior,"  "The  White  Doe  of  Rylstone." 
Here  the  great  Ode  on  Immortality  was  begun, 
and  here  "The  Prelude"  and  "The  Excur- 
sion "  were  largely  written.  In  the  seclusion  of 
this  tiny  garden  Wordsworth's  poetic  prime  was 
reached,  and  here  his  genius  touched  its  highest 
mark  of  expression. 

In  1808  the  cottage  became  too  small  for  the 
growing  family,  and  the  Wordsworths  removed 
to  Allan  Bank,  a  larger  house  at  the  north  end 
of  Grasmere.  From  thence,  in  1811,  another 
move  was  made  to  the  Rectory,  a  very  charm- 
ing place  opposite  the  church  and  within  sound 
of  the  swiftly  running  Rotha.     Here  sorrow 

44 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

lived  with  the  Wordsvvorths  and  became  their 
familiar  companion.  Of  their  five  children 
two  died  under  this  roof:  Catherine,  whom  De 
Quincey  loved  with  such  intensity  of  ardor  that 
he  was  terribly  shaken  by  her  sudden  death — 
"  never,  from  the  foundation  of  these  mighty 
hills,"  he  wrote,  "  was  there  so  jfierce  a  convul- 
sion of  grief  as  mastered  my  faculties  on  receiv- 
ing that  heart-shattering  news";  and  Thomas, 
who  followed  his  sister  after  a  brief  intei"\'al. 
Wordsworth's  grief  was,  after  the  manner  of 
the  man,  deep  and  passionate;  forty  years  later 
he  could  not  speak  of  these  sorrows  of  his  early 
life  without  agitation  and  suffering.  The  chil- 
dren sleep  in  the  churchyard  across  the  nar- 
row road  from  the  Rectory,  and  the  associa- 
tions of  the  place  so  weighed  upon  the  poet's 
spirit  that  another  and  final  removal  was  made 
in  the  spring  of  1813  to  Rydal  Mount. 

Few  houses  have  been  described  so  often,  and 
none  more  perfectly  matches  the  picture  of  a 
poet's  home  as  the  imagination  instinctively 
conceives  it.  Standing  on  the  rocky  side  of 
Nab  Scar,  above  Rydal  Lake,  almost  concealed 
by  the  vines  which  have  grown  apparently  into 

45 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

its  very  structure,  its  terraces  rich  in  hedges  and 
foliage,  Rydal  INIount  is  a  type  of  Enghsh  re- 
pose, maturity,  and  natural  loveliness.  As  one 
walks  up  the  quiet  road  past  the  little  church, 
the  stir  and  turmoil  of  life  are  so  distant  and 
alien  that  one  wonders  if  they  be  not  the  dreams 
of  a  disordered  mind.  Here  are  silence,  seclu- 
sion, fathomless  depths  of  greenness,  enchant- 
ing beauty  of  glancing  water  and  wandering 
mountain  line. 

At  Rydal  Mount  "  The  Excursion  "  was  fin- 
ished, and  "  Laodamia,"  the  "  Evening  Ode," 
"  Yarrow  Revisited,"  and  the  series  of  Eccle- 
siastical Sonnets  written.  The  magical  quality, 
the  inimitable  charm,  of  the  "  Daffodils,"  the 
"  Solitary  Reaper,"  the  "  Cuckoo,"  had  van- 
ished, the  didactic  note  had  become  more  dis- 
tinct; but  in  his  happiest  hours  the  poet  still 
had  command  of  a  noble  style.  Mr.  Myers  has 
noted  the  striking  and  beautiful  close  of 
Wordsworth's  poetic  life.  It  was  in  1818  when 
Nature  seemed  to  take  solemn  farewell  of  the 
genius  which  she  had  inspired,  and  which  had, 
in  turn,  been  her  interpreter.  There  came  one 
of  those  sunsets  sometimes  seen  among  the 
Cambrian  hills,  the  splendors  of  which  not  only 

46 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

pass  quite  beyond  speech,  but  impress  even  the 
unimaginative  as  ahnost  apart  from  the  ordi- 
nary processes  of  Nature.  The  earth  and  the 
sky,  in  the  radiance  of  shifting  cloud  and  fold- 
ing mist,  seem  to  blend  together  into  a  new  and 
unspeakably  wonderful  world  of  light  and 
color  and  spiritual  splendor.  Under  the  spell 
of  that  vision  the  poet's  imagination  rose  once 
more  to  its  earlier  level  in  the  "  Evening  Ode, 
composed  on  an  evening  of  extraordinary 
splendor  and  beauty": 

No  sound  is  uttered,  but  a  deep 

And  solemn  harmony  pervades 
The  hollow  vale  from  steep  to  steep. 

And  penetrates  the  glades. 
Far  distant  Images  draw  nigh. 

Called  forth  by  wondrous  potency 
Of  beamy  radiance,  that  imbues 
Whate'er  it  strikes  with  gem-like  hues! 

In  vision  exquisitely  clear 
Herds  range  along  the  mountain  side; 
And  glistening  antlers  are  descried. 

And  gilded  flocks  appear. 

The  poet  seemed  to  recognize  the  dechne  of  his 
poetic  power,  the  hardening  of  his  faculties ;  for 
he  adds,  with  pathetic  clearness  of  insight: 

49 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

Full  early  lost,  and  fruitlessly  deplored ; 

Which  at  this  moment,  on  my  waking  sight, 
Appears  to  shine,  by  miracle  restored ! 

My  soul,  though  yet  confined  to  earth. 

Rejoices  in  a  second  birth; 
— 'T  is   past,  the  visionary   splendor   fades ; 
And  night  approaches  with  her  shades. 


In  1843,  on  the  death  of  Southey,  Words- 
worth was  persuaded  to  accept  the  position  of 
Poet  Laureate,  and  nobly  wore  the  honor 
through  seven  years  of  unbroken  silence.  And 
in  this  vine-embosomed  house,  in  April,  1850, 
the  end  came.  As  he  had  Hved,  so  he  died,  in 
simple  but  subHme  repose.  The  stream  of  visi- 
tors who  pour  through  the  Grasmere  church- 
yard cannot  destroy  the  spell  of  solemn  silence 
which  enfolds  the  poets'  corner  in  that  beauti- 
ful place  of  death  and  life.  The  old  church, 
the  steep  hill,  the  shining  thread  of  waterfall, 
the  silent  curve  and  sweep  of  the  Rotha,  the 
tombs  of  the  poets — for  William,  his  wife, 
Dorothy,  and  Hartley  Coleridge  lie  together 
in  that  sacred  place — who  is  not  the  better  for 
the  sight  and  the  memory  of  them! 

The  Lake  Country  is  not  only  the  natural 
50 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

but  the  spiritual  background  of  Wordsworth's 
poetry.  That  poetry  was,  with  few  important 
exceptions,  written  there;  in  very  many  in- 
stances it  grew  out  of  localities  which  have  been 
accurately  determined,  or  was  suggested  by  in- 
cidents which  are  still  remembered;  so  intimate, 
indeed,  is  the  connection  between  the  great  mass 
of  the  shorter  poems  and  the  landscape  and  life 
of  the  region  that  the  verse  seems  but  the  de- 
scription and  interpretation  of  landscape  and 
life.  In  the  longer  poems  passage  after  passage 
can  be  assigned  to  definite  places  or  connected 
with  persons  and  incidents.  But  in  a  still  deeper 
and  more  spiritual  sense  was  Wordsworth's  im- 
agination affected  by  the  little  world  of  moun- 
tain, lake,  and  cloud  in  which  he  lived.  That 
country  suggests  and  illustrates,  in  a  marvelous 
way,  the  two  distinctive  characteristics  of  Words- 
worth's poetry :  clear,  accurate  sight  of  the  fact, 
and  the  sudden  expansion  of  the  vision  to  take 
in  its  largest  relations  and  its  most  far-reaching 
spiritual  symbolism.  Wordsworth's  genius  was 
notable  for  its  twofold  recognition  of  the  famil- 
iar and  the  sublime  in  Nature,  its  closeness  of 
observation  and  its  clearness  of  imaginative  in- 

51 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

sight,  its  scientific  exactness  and  its  poetic  vi- 
sion; if  the  phrase  may  be  permitted,  Words- 
worth habitually  saw  both  the  hmnan  and  the 
divine  sides  of  Nature — the  fragrant  orchard 
at  his  door,  and  the  last  sublime  reach  of  moun- 
tain as  it  fades  into  sky. 

The  Lake  Country  presents  both  these  as- 
pects of  Nature.  The  mountains  are  not  high, 
and  yet  they  are  touched  with  sublimity;  the 
cattle  browse  on  their  grassy  slopes,  and  yet 
infinity  and  eternity  seem  somehow  embodied 
in  them.  They  are  both  familiar  and  mysteri- 
ous. More  than  this,  they  suggest  in  the  most 
subtle  way  the  play  of  the  imagination. 
Through  the  upper  Vales  the  mists  continually 
roll  in  from  the  sea,  and  the  whole  country  is 
enfolded  in  an  atmosphere  which  brings  with  it 
all  the  magic  of  light  and  shade,  all  the  mystery 
of  shadow  and  distance  and  the  commingling 
of  sky  and  earth.  Miracles  of  hght  and  color 
are  daily  wrought  among  those  hills;  enchant- 
ments and  spells  are  woven  there  which  the 
imagination  cannot  escape.  The  real  and  the 
visionary  continually  intermingle.  The  atmo- 
sphere works  such  marvels  that  it  becomes  a  vis- 

52 


AND   WORDSWORTH 

ible  type  of  the  play  and  processes  of  the  im- 
agination. In  that  country,  as  in  the  poetry 
of  its  interpreter,  there  are  always  the  solid 
mass,  the  definite  outline,  tlie  substantial  form; 
and  there  is  also  the  finer  and  visionary  world 
into  which  the  real  world  seems  to  rise,  and 
with  which  it  seems  to  blend  in  a  whole  which 
is  both  perishable  and  imperishable,  both  ma- 
terial and  spiritual:  the  unity  of  the  seen  and 
the  unseen.  No  one  understood  this  subtle 
quality  of  the  Lake  Country  landscape  better 
than  Wordsworth,  and  no  one  has  so  clearly 
defined  and  described  it  as  he  in  the  follow- 
ing passage : 

The  rain  here  comes  down  heartily,  and  is  frequently 
succeeded  by  clear,  bright  weather,  when  every  brook 
is  vocal  and  every  torrent  sonorous ;  brooks  and  torrents 
which  are  never  muddy  even  in  the  heaviest  floods. 
Days  of  unsettled  weather,  with  partial  showers,  are 
very  frequent ;  but  the  showers  darkening  or  brighten- 
ing as  they  fly  from  hill  to  hill  are  not  less  grateful 
to  the  eye  than  finel}'^  interwoven  passages  of  gay  and 
sad  music  are  touching  to  the  ear.  Vapors  exhaling 
from  the  lakes  and  meadows  after  sunrise  in  a  hot  sea- 
son, or  in  moist  weather  brooding  upon  the  heights, 
or  descending  towards  the  valleys  with  Inaudible  motion, 
give  a  visionary  character  to  everything  around  them ; 

53 


THE   LAKE   COUNTRY 

and  are  in  themselves  so  beautiful  as  to  dispose  us  to 
enter  into  the  feelings  of  those  simple  nations  (such 
as  the  Laplanders  of  this  day)  by  whom  they  are 
taken  for  guardian  deities  of  the  mountains ;  or  to 
sympathize  with  others  who  have  fancied  these  delicate 
apparitions  to  be  the  spirits  of  their  departed  an- 
cestors. Akin  to  these  are  fleecy  clouds  resting  upon 
the  hill-tops ;  they  are  not  easily  managed  in  picture, 
with  their  accompaniments  of  blue  sky,  but  how  glori- 
ous are  they  in  nature !  how  pregnant  with  imagination 
for  the  poet ! 


54 


.v: —    -Htt^l 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 


]MERSON  was  born  in  what 
has  become  one  of  the  busi- 
est sections  of  Boston;  but 
when  the  future  poet  and 
thinker  opened  his  eyes  in 
this  world,  on  the  25th  day  of 
May,  1803,  it  was  in  a  Con- 
gregational parsonage  "  in  the  silence  of  retire- 
ment, yet  in  the  center  of  the  territory  of  the 
metropolis,"  where,  to  continue  the  words  of 
his  father,  "  we  may  worship  the  Lord  our 
God."  That  was  the  lifelong  occupation  of 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  and  it  is  interesting  to 
note  that  from  the  beginning  it  was  singularly 
free  from  conventions  and  forms  of  every  kind. 
Nature  is,  to  most  men,  a  middle  term  between 

59 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

God  and  man;  to  Emerson  it  was  a  common 
ground  over  which  the  Universal  Spirit  always 
brooded,  and  where  the  open-hearted  might 
happen  upon  inspiring  hours.  He  felt  the 
sublimity  of  the  Psalms  of  David,  and  the  no- 
ble swell  of  the  Te  Deum,  the  ancient  hjTnii 
which  the  centuries  have  sung,  never  left  him 
cold;  but  his  highest  thoughts  came  to  him 
in  the  broad  silence  of  summer  afternoons 
in  the  fields,  or  when  the  stars  kept  up 
the  ancient  splendor  of  the  wintry  heavens. 
"  Boys,"  Dr.  Holmes  reports  him  as  saying  to 
two  youths  who  were  walking  with  him  as  they 
entered  the  wood,  "  here  we  recognize  the  pres- 
ence of  the  Universal  Spirit.  The  breeze  says 
to  us  in  its  own  language.  How  d'ye  do?  How 
d'ye  do?  and  we  have  already  taken  our  hats  off 
and  are  answering  it  with  our  own  How  d'ye 
do?  How  d'ye  do?  And  all  the  waving 
branches  of  the  trees,  and  all  the  flowers,  and 
the  field  of  corn  yonder,  and  the  singing  brook, 
and  the  insect,  and  the  bird — everj'^  living  thing 
and  things  we  call  inanimate  feel  the  same  di- 
vine universal  impulse  while  they  join  with  us, 
and  we  with  them,  in  the  greeting  which  is  the 

60 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

salutation  of  the  Universal  Spirit."  In  the  life 
of  the  author  of  "  Wood-notes,"  as  in  that  of 
the  author  of  the  great  ode  on  "  Intimations  of 
Immortality,"  Nature  was  a  background  so 
intimately  and  reverently  lived  with  that  the 
work  of  both  poets  was  not  only  colored  but 
penetrated  by  it. 

Favorable  conditions  conspired  in  Emerson's 
ancestry,  birth,  and  childhood  to  make  him  pe- 
culiarly sensitive  to  the  influence  of  star  and 
field  and  wood,  by  familiarizing  him  with  the 
simplest  habits  of  life  and  centering  his  inter- 
est in  the  things  of  the  mind.  He  was  the  child 
of  a  long  line  of  highly  educated  and  poorly 
paid  ministers;  men  who  had  the  tastes  and 
resources  of  scholars,  but  whose  ways  of  living 
were  as  frugal  as  the  ways  of  the  poorest  far- 
mers to  whom  they  preached.  "We  are  poor  and 
cold,  and  have  little  meal,  and  little  wood,  and 
little  meat,"  wrote  his  father  at  the  close  of  his 
Harvard  pastorate  and  on  the  eve  of  the  re- 
moval to  Boston,  "  but,  thank  God,  courage 
enough," 

The  moral  fiber  of  the  stock  was  as  vigorous 
as  its  life  had  been  self-denying  and  abstemi- 

61 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

oiis;  but  it  must  not  be  imagined  that  the  long 
line  of  ministers  behind  Emerson  were  pallid 
ascetics.  When  his  father  was  on  the  verge  of 
death,  he  wrote  to  a  relative:  "  You  will  think 
me  better,  because  of  the  levity  with  which  this 
page  is  blurred.  Threads  of  this  levity  have 
been  interwoven  with  the  entire  web  of  my  life." 
This  touch  of  gayety  could  hardly  be  called 
levity;  it  was,  rather,  the  overflow  of  a  very 
deep  spring  in  the  hearts  of  a  race  of  men  and 
women  who  kept  their  indebtedness  to  exter- 
nal conditions  at  the  lowest  in  order  that  they 
might  possess  and  use  freely  the  amplest  in- 
tellectual and  spiritual  means.  Again  and 
again,  in  the  simple  but  noble  annals  of  this 
family,  whose  name  was  on  the  college  roll  in 
every  generation,  one  comes  upon  the  fruit  of 
this  kind  of  frugality  of  appetite  in  the  fine 
use  of  common  things,  and,  above  all,  in  an 
intimate  sense  of  access  to  Nature  and  the 
right  to  draw  freely  on  her  resources  of  beauty 
and  power. 

This  ancestral  heritage  of  simple  fare  and 
good  books  first  comes  to  light  in  the  little  com- 
munity with  which  the  greatest  of  the  long  line 

62 


c 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

of  scholars  and  teachers  is  so  intimately  asso- 
ciated that  to  think  of  "Nature"  and  "Wood- 
notes  "  is  to  see  Concord  lying  in  quiet  beauty 
in  a  tranquil  New  England  landscape.  There 
were  Emersons  in  the  pulpit  in  Ipswich  and 
3Iendon,  but  it  is  upon  Peter  Bulkeley,  grand- 
father at  the  seventh  remove  of  Ralph  Waldo, 
that  attention  rests  as  typical  ancestor.  He 
was  descended,  one  of  the  oldest  of  the  colonial 
chronicles  tells  us,  from  an  honorable  family  of 
Bedfordshire;  educated  at  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  of  the  rich  tone  of  whose  second 
quadrangle  Ruskin  spoke  with  enthusiasm ;  was 
given  a  goodly  benefice,  but  found  himself  later 
unable  to  conform  to  the  services  of  the  English 
Church;  came  to  New  England  in  1635,  and 
after  a  brief  stay  in  Cambridge  "  carried  a  good 
Number  of  Planters  with  him,  up  further  into 
the  Woods,  where  they  gathered  the  Twelfth 
Church,  then  formed  in  the  Colony,  and  call'd 
the  Town  by  the  name  of  Concord." 

This  pioneer  scholar  is  described  as  a  well- 
read  person,  an  exalted  Christian,  who  had  the 
reverence  not  only  of  his  own  people  but  of  all 
sorts  of  people  throughout  the  land,  and  espe- 

65 


EMERSON    AXD    CONCORD 

cially  of  his  fellow-ministers,  who  would  still 
address  him  as  a  "  Father,  a  Prophet,  a  Coun- 
sellor on  all  occasions."  He  had,  we  are  told, 
"  a  competently  good  stroke  at  Latin  Poetry," 
and  he  gave  no  small  part  of  his  library  to  Har- 
vard College.  William  Emerson,  who  came 
five  generations  later,  was  as  notable  a  leader 
in  Concord  as  his  great-great-grandfather  had 
been.  He  preached  the  gospel  of  resistance  to 
tyrants  and  practiced  it  as  well;  for  he  left  the 
pulpit  in  Concord  to  join  the  army  at  Ticon- 
deroga.  When  the  miniature  but  immensely 
significant  fight  in  which 

.   .   .  the  embattled  farmers  stood. 
And  fired  the  shot  heard  round  the  world, 

took  place  at  the  bridge,  he  stood  on  the  steps 
of  the  Old  Manse,  which  he  had  built  ten  years 
before,  and  was  kept  out  of  the  fray  only  by 
the  vigorous  intervention  of  his  friends. 

In  1834,  when  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  was 
at  the  end  of  his  period  of  apprenticeship,  had 
withdrawn  from  the  pulpit  and  made  his  first 
memorable  trip  to  Europe,  he  went  back  to  the 
Old  Manse  in  Concord  as  to  his  ancestral  home ; 

66 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

henceforth  he  was  to  know  no  other.  His 
grandfather,  Dr.  Ripley,  sustained  in  the  fa- 
mous old  house  the  best  traditions  of  his  race; 
"  he  was  a  natural  gentleman,"  wrote  Emerson 
in  a  charming  character  study;  "  no  dandy,  but 
courtly,  hospitable,  manly,  and  public-spirited; 
his  nature  social,  his  house  open  to  all  men. 
His  brow  was  serene  and  open  to  his  visitor, 
for  he  loved  men,  and  he  had  no  studies, 
no  occupations,  which  company  could  inter- 
rupt." 

In  September  of  the  following  year  Emer- 
son took  his  young  wife  to  live  in  the  house 
which  was  to  be  his  home  to  the  end,  and  which 
has  become,  by  reason  of  its  association  with 
him  and  his  friends,  one  of  the  places  which 
both  illustrate  and  interpret  American  life  at 
its  best.  The  village  of  Concord  was  then  the 
quietest  of  rural  communities;  no  trains  con- 
nected it  with  Boston;  no  literary  pilgrims  vis- 
ited it;  no  city  folk  had  discovered  it.  It  was 
rich  in  historical  associations;  it  had  long  been 
the  home  of  a  small  group  of  families  of  social 
and  intellectual  distinction;  the  memories  of  its 
heroic  age  were  still  fresh  in  the  minds  and 

67 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

hearts  of  elderly  people;  but  it  did  not  stand 
out  as  yet  on  the  map  of  the  modern  world.  It 
was  what  Dr.  Holmes  would  have  called  a 
Brahman  town;  in  quality  and  dignity  of  char- 
acter and  habit  it  held  a  place  by  itself;  and 
when,  later,  three  or  four  men  of  genius  made 
it  famous,  it  seemed  as  if  they  had  revealed 
Concord  to  the  world  rather  than  imparted  to 
it  a  sudden  prestige  by  reason  of  their  residence 
there. 

The  country  which  was  to  be  the  background 
of  Emerson's  life  and  work  was  in  such  conso- 
nance with  his  temper  and  habits  that,  as  in  the 
case  of  Wordsworth  and  the  English  lake  coun- 
try, it  is  not  fanciful  to  trace  a  real  rather  than 
an  accidental  relation  and  resemblance  between 
the  men  and  the  landscapes  they  loved.  In  a 
very  true  sense,  all  history  and  all  countries 
were  behind  Emerson's  thought  and  work;  he 
seemed  to  have  the  two  hemispheres  in  his  brain, 
one  lobe  being  Oriental  and  the  other  Occi- 
dental. In  certain  moods  he  was  of  the  East 
as  distinctly  as  in  the  applications  and  urgency 
of  his  thought  he  was  of  the  West.  He  was 
akin  with  Saadi  in  the  breadth  of  his  view  and 

68 


The  Pines  of  Walden 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

the  catholicity  of  his  experience;  and  he  was 
brother  to  Hafiz,  not  in  physical  delight  in  fra- 
grance and  melody,  but  in  instinctive  ease  in 
softening  the  hard  line  of  the  fact  by  evoking 
its  mystical  significance.  He  was  enamored  of 
Plato,  and  spoke  of  him  with  more  warmth  of 
advocacy  than  was  in  his  tones  in  urging  the 
claims  of  any  other  man  of  representative 
genius.  He  valued  the  Roman  power  of  or- 
ganization ;  he  felt  the  immense  sense  of  reality 
in  Dante's  symbolism  of  the  experience  of  the 
soul  in  the  three  worlds;  he  had  read  nearly  all 
the  fifty-five  volumes  of  Goethe  that  he  owned 
in  the  German,  although  he  was  never  a 
methodical  reader,  and  he  was  in  deep  sym- 
pathy with  Goethe's  great  contemporaries;  and 
he  was  at  home  in  the  wide  range  of  English  lit- 
erature. He  moved  lightly  through  the  store- 
house of  the  past,  with  sound  knowledge  of 
what  it  contained  and  with  a  sure  instinct  of 
finding  what  was  of  value  to  him.  He  bor- 
rowed generously,  as  he  had  a  right,  from  the 
capital  of  the  race,  and  in  every  case  he  repaid 
the  loan  at  a  high  rate  of  interest. 

Cosmopolitan  as  Emerson  was  in  his  inter- 
71 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

ests,  his  surroundings,  his  tastes,  he  was  never- 
theless a  true  New  Englander  of  the  Concord 
quality.  No  one  roamed  further,  but  no  one 
was  a  more  devout  home-keeper.  He  was  eager 
to  get  the  spiritual  product,  the  deposit  in  the 
spirit,  of  the  strain  and  storm  of  life;  but  he 
hugged  his  own  hearth  and  was  content  to  hear 
faint  echoes  of  the  tumult  of  life  in  the  dis- 
tance. A  cosmopolitan  in  the  range  of  his  in- 
telligence, he  was  a  provincial  in  his  habits  and 
personal  associations;  and  this  was  the  prime 
characteristic  of  Concord.  To  a  European  it 
must  have  been  a  place  of  extraordinary  con- 
trasts; it  was  the  home  of  the  loftiest  idealism 
and  of  the  simplest  mamier  of  life.  The  little 
group  of  men  and  women  of  culture,  among 
whom  Emerson  took  his  place  by  personal  and 
hereditary  right,  shared  this  habit  of  rural  or 
rustic  simplicity  with  the  farmer  folk  who  sur- 
rounded them.  In  the  old-fashioned  farm- 
houses, which  stood  and  still  stand  along  the 
roads  or  hidden  among  trees  in  sheltered  nooks, 
there  was  a  mingled  air  of  thrift  and  gen- 
erosity. They  were  built  on  ample  lines,  and 
their   frugality   was   tempered   by   hospitality. 

72 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

The  living  was  of  the  plainest ;  the  mug  of  hard 
cider  and  the  pot  of  beans  were  in  every  house ; 
but  there  were  also  reverence,  sobriety,  respect 
for  learning,  the  peace  of  God,  and  a  love  of 
liberty  that  had  elements  of  passion  in  it. 

"  These  poor  farmers,  who  came  up  that  day 
to  defend  their  native  soil,"  said  Emerson  in  a 
memorable  historical  address,  "  acted  from  the 
simplest  instincts;  they  did  not  know  it  was  a 
deed  of  fame  they  were  doing.  These  men  did 
not  babble  of  glory;  they  never  dreamed  their 
children  would  contend  which  had  done  the 
most.  They  supposed  they  had  a  right  to  their 
corn  and  their  cattle — without  paying  tribute 
to  any  but  their  own  Governors.  And  as  they 
had  no  fear  of  man,  they  yet  did  have  a  fear  of 
God."  And  he  recalls  the  simple  statement  of 
one  of  these  "  embattled  farmers "  "  that  he 
went  to  the  services  of  the  day  with  the  same 
seriousness  and  acknowledgment  of  God  which 
he  carried  to  the  church."  The  spirit  of  the 
best  in  New  England  is  revealed  in  these  few 
words.  They  feared  God,  but  they  feared  no- 
thing else ;  they  held  to  the  highest  truths  in  the 
simplest  speech;  and  the  best  of  them  carried 

73 


EMERSOX    AND    CONCORD 

the  world  in  their  minds  and  stayed  quietly  at 
home.  They  had  penetrated  to  the  founda- 
tions; and  although  there  was  in  Concord,  as 
elsewhere  in  New  England,  an  aristocracy  of 
birth  and  intellect,  men  and  women  were  hon- 
ored on  a  basis  of  character. 

This  independence  went  so  far  that  it  some- 
times became  whimsical,  as  in  Thoreau,  and 
sometimes  issued  in  such  an  excess  of  noncon- 
formit}'^  that  a  man  found  it  impossible  to  get 
on  with  his  neighbors,  and  took  refuge  in  isola- 
tion. The  peculiarity  of  the  New  England 
hermit  has  not  been  his  desire  to  get  near  to 
God,  but  his  anxiety  to  get  away  from  man. 
In  later  j^ears,  when  Concord  had  become 
a  Mecca,  a  whimsical  self-consciousness  was 
sometimes  evident  in  the  more  individualistic 
members  of  the  community.  Alcott  said  that 
Thoreau  thought  he  lived  in  the  center  of  the 
universe  and  would  annex  the  rest  of  the  planet 
to  Concord;  while  Thoreau's  view  of  his  own 
relation  to  the  place  is  reflected  in  his  confes- 
sion :  "Almost  I  believe  the  Concord  would  not 
rise  and  overflow  its  banks  again  were  I  not 
here."     This  note  of  superiority  did   not  es- 

74 


•     « 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

cape  the  keen-witted  neighbors  of  Thoreau. 
"  Henry  talks  about  Nature,"  said  Madam 
Hoar,  "  just  as  if  she  'd  been  born  and  brought 
up  in  Concord." 

Emerson  was  the  highest  type  of  this  min- 
gled frugality  of  the  hfe  of  the  body  and 
generosity  of  the  life  of  the  mind;  of  this  har- 
monization of  the  highest  and  broadest  interests 
with  the  simplest  domesticity.  He  took  plea- 
sure in  dissociating  the  resources  and  distinc- 
tion of  the  intellectual  life  from  the  conventions 
and  forms  of  an  elaborate  social  Hfe;  and  he 
seemed  to  affect  in  dress  and  manner  a  slight 
rusticity  as  heightening  the  eifect  of  his 
thought,  as  the  slight  hesitation  in  his  speech 
in  public  address  brought  out  the  marvelous  fe- 
licity of  his  diction.  He  would  not  have  dis- 
claimed the  compliment  of  being  called  the 
"  Yankee  Plato  "  ;  so  entirely  content  was  he  to 
be  a  resident  of  Concord  as  well  as  a  citizen  of 
the  world.  In  nothing  was  his  soundness  of 
nature,  his  health  of  mind,  more  evident  than 
in  the  delicacy  with  which  he  protected  himself 
from  the  intimacy  of  some  who  were  eager  to 
gain  some  personal  possession  of  his  thought, 

77 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

and  the  gentle  persistency  with  which  he  held 
unbalanced  people  at  a  distance  and  kept  him- 
self clear  of  all  rash  attempts  to  bring  in  the 
millennium  prematurely. 

Hawthorne  has  given  us  a  characteristic  re- 
port of  the  strange  folk  to  be  met  in  Concord 
in  the  days  of  the  "  newness  "  :  "  It  was  neces- 
sary to  go  but  a  little  way  beyond  my  threshold 
before  meeting  with  stranger  moral  shapes  of 
men  than  might  have  been  encountered  else- 
where in  a  circuit  of  a  thousand  miles.  These 
hobgoblins  of  flesh  and  blood  were  attracted 
thither  by  the  wide-spreading  influence  of  a 
great  original  thinker,  who  had  his  earthly 
abode  at  the  opposite  extremity  of  our  village. 
His  mind  acted  upon  other  minds  of  a  certain 
constitution  with  wonderful  magnetism,  and 
drew  many  men  upon  long  pilgrimages  to 
speak  with  him  face  to  face.  Young  vision- 
aries, to  whom  just  so  much  insight  had  been 
imparted  as  to  make  life  all  a  labyrinth  around 
them,  came  to  seek  the  clue  that  should  guide 
them  out  of  their  self -involved  bewilderment. 
Gray-headed  theorists  whose  systems,  at  first 
air,   had   finally   imprisoned   them   in   an   iron 

78 


EMERSON   AND    CONCORD 

framework,  traveled  painfully  to  his  door,  not 
to  ask  deliverance,  but  to  invite  the  free  spirit 
into  their  own  thralldom." 

No  one  will  ever  know  the  annoyances,  per- 
plexities, and  dangers  of  Emerson's  position; 
what  every  one  does  know  is  that  he  never  fell 
a  victim  to  the  countless  illusions,  delusions, 
and  unbalanced  dreams  in  which  reproachful 
and  perhaps  impertinent  followers,  who  mis- 
read his  leading,  endeavored  to  involve  him. 
The  foremost  idealist  of  the  New  World,  he 
rendered  incalculable  service  to  the  cause  he  had 
at  heart  by  holding  it  clean  and  clear  above 
the  touch  of  fanaticism,  impracticable  experi- 
ment, and  the  bitterness  of  the  egoistical 
reformer.  If  he  had  committed  the  fortunes 
of  Idealism  to  a  disastrous  venture,  the  loss 
to  the  youth  of  America  would  have  been 
irreparable. 

In  April,  1824,  two  years  before  he  took 
refuge  in  Concord,  "  stretched  beneath  the 
pines,"  Emerson  wrote  the  poem  which  ex- 
presses the  deepest  instinct  of  his  nature  and 
the  tranquillity  and  detachment  he  was  to  find 
in  the  quiet  village: 

79 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

Good-bye,  proud  world !  I  'm  going  home : 

I  am  going  to  my  own  hearthstone, 
Bosomed  in  yon  green  hills  alone, — 
A  secret  nook  in  a  pleasant  land. 
Whose  groves  the  frolic  fairies  planned; 
Where  arches  green,  the  livelong  day. 
Echo  the  blackbird's  roundelay. 
And  vulgar   feet  have  never  trod 
A  spot  that  is  sacred  to  thought  and  God. 

O,  when  I  am  safe  in  my  sylvan  home, 
I  tread  on  the  pride  of  Greece  and  Rome; 
And  when  I  am  stretched  beneath  the  pines, 
Where  the  evening  star  so  holy  shines, 
I  laugh  at  the  lore  and  the  pride  of  man, 
At  the  sophist  schools  and  the  learned  clan; 
For  what  are  they  all,  in  their  high  conceit. 
When  man  in  the  bush  with  God  may  meet? 

Emerson  was  in  no  sense  a  hermit;  an  invet- 
erate traveler  of  the  mind,  he  was,  for  his  time, 
an  experienced  traveler  among  his  kind.  His 
trips  to  Europe  were  memorable  by  reason  of 
his  quick  and  decisive  insight,  of  which  the 
"English  Traits"  is  a  permanent  record;  and 
by  reason  of  what  he  brought  back  in  broader 
sympathies  and  clearer  discernment  of  the 
great  race  qualities.     He  was  for  many  years 

80 


\  Corner  of  the  Study 


EMERSOX   AND   CONCORD 

a  familiar  and  honored  figure  on  the  lyceum 
platform  in  distant  sections  of  the  country,  and 
he  came  to  have  a  wide  knowledge  of  the 
United  States  of  the  middle  decades  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  He  had  a  keen  appetite 
for  good  talk,  and  he  was  often  seen  in  Cam- 
bridge and  Boston  in  social  gatherings  great 
and  small.  But  his  genius  was  essentially 
meditative;  he  brooded  over  his  subjects  until 
they  cleared  themselves  in  his  mind;  he  kept 
himself  in  an  attitude  of  invitation,  and  his 
thoughts  came  to  him;  above  all,  his  work  was 
the  fruit  of  the  ripening  of  his  own  nature,  and 
he  needed  alike  the  quiet  of  the  fallow  and  of 
the  growing  field.  The  solitude  in  which  a  man 
finds  himself  and  the  silence  in  which  his 
thoughts  come  to  him  he  found  in  Concord. 

Tranquillity  and  peace  were  its  possessions 
by  reason  of  its  isolation  and  of  the  conforma- 
tion of  its  landscape.  Monadnock  and  Wachu- 
sett  stood  on  the  horizon  for  those  who  went  to 
look  at  them;  but  Concord  lay  content  along  a 
river  of  slumberous  mood,  with  a  group  of  pel- 
lucid lakes  or  ponds  within  easy  reach,  with 
broad  meadows  and  low  hills  and  stretches  of 

83 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

whispering  pines  at  hand.  It  was  a  shire-town, 
and  it  had  business  relations  with  lumbermen 
and  farmers  who  came  to  it  for  supplies.  It 
was  on  the  route  of  four  stage  lines,  and  under 
the  roofs  of  as  many  taverns  old-fashioned 
toddy  was  mixed  for  home  consumption  and  as 
an  expression  of  hospitality  to  guests  and  trav- 
elers. Thoreau  noted  in  the  quiet  village  all 
the  signs  of  the  ordinary  uses  and  habits  of 
men:  "  I  observed  that  the  vitals  of  the  village 
were  the  grocery,  the  bar-room,  the  post-office, 
and  the  bank;  and,  as  a  necessary  part  of  the 
machinerj%  they  kept  a  bell,  a  big  gun,  and  a 
fire-engine  at  convenient  places,  and  the  houses 
were  so  arranged  as  to  make  the  most  of  man- 
kind, in  lanes  and  fronting  one  another,  so  that 
every  traveler  had  to  run  the  gauntlet,  and 
every  man,  woman,  and  child  might  get  a  lick 
at  him." 

It  must  be  remembered,  however,  that  two 
houses  within  call  made  a  crowded  community 
for  Thoreau,  and  that  the  appearance  of  a 
strange  or  inquisitive  person  on  the  highway 
sent  him  incontinently  into  the  woods.  Con- 
cord, in  the  thirties  and  forties,  was  an  entirely 

84 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

normal  village,  with  the  usual  conveniences  for 
conducting  life ;  but  the  life  of  the  time  was  ex- 
ceedingly deliberate  in  movement,  and  the  pas- 
sage of  several  stages  a  day  did  not  make  a 
fever  in  the  blood  of  the  villagers.  Emerson 
found  there  seclusion  without  isolation,  and 
solitude  and  silence  tempered  with  the  most  con- 
genial companionship. 

The  Old  Manse,  in  which  he  lived  for  the  fii'st 
year,  is  a  dignified  old  house,  in  a  locality  of 
heroic  tradition,  in  a  place  of  singularly  repose- 
ful beauty,  in  so  quiet  an  air  that  one  can  easily 
overhear  the  whisperings  of  the  pines.  Under 
its  roof  generations  of  gentlefolk  have  lived 
frugally  and  in  loyal  devotion  to  the  highest  in- 
terests of  the  spirit;  from  colonial  days  books 
of  classic  quality  have  been  within  reach  in  the 
halls  and  rooms;  in  a  small  room  on  the  second 
floor  at  the  back  of  the  house  Hawthorne  wrote 
a  part  of  the  "  flosses  from  an  Old  Manse  " 
and  Emerson  wrote  "  Nature."  When  the  lat- 
ter appeared  anonymously,  the  question,  "Who 
is  the  author  of  '  Nature '  ? "  brought  out  the 
reply,  "  God  and  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson." 

If  tranquillity  is  the  distinctive  note  of  Con- 
85 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

cord,  a  tinge  of  something  dim  and  shadowy 
seems  to  touch  the  Old  Manse  and  impart  to  it, 
not  gloom  nor  sadness,  but  something  of  the 
twilight  effect  of  the  pine  groves.  When  one 
recalls  its  traditions  of  plain  living  and  high 
thinking,  one  is  reminded  of  Dove  Cottage ;  but 
the  little  stone  cottage  embosomed  in  foliage 
where  Wordsworth  spent  the  most  productive 
decade  of  his  life  is  now  a  shrine  set  apart  to 
memory,  wliile  the  Old  Manse  is  still  a  home 
from  which  in  these  later  years  has  come  picto- 
rial genius  of  a  high  order;  and  the  impulses 
which  have  made  Concord  a  place  apart  have 
not  spent  their  force. 

In  this  rural  community,  snugly  at  home  in 
a  landscape  full  of  repose,  Emerson  found  the 
best  conditions  for  his  growth  and  work,  and 
through  his  long  life  lived  on  most  intimate 
terms  with  his  nearest  and  most  companionable 
neighbor.  Nature.  "  Hail  to  the  quiet  fields  of 
my  fathers,"  he  wrote  when  he  had  settled  him- 
self in  the  Old  INIanse.  "  Not  wholly  unat- 
tended by  supernatural  friendship  and  favor 
let  me  come  hither.  Bless  my  purposes  as  they 
are   simple    and   virtuous.  .  .  .  Henceforth    I 

86 


EMERSON  AND  CONCORD 

design  not  to  utter  any  speech,  poem,  or  book 
that  is  not  entirely  and  peculiarly  my  work.  I 
will  say,  at  public  lectures  and  the  like,  those 
things  which  I  have  meditated  for  their  own 
sake  and  not  for  the  first  time  with  a  view  to 
that  occasion."  In  these  words  is  to  be  found 
the  secret  of  his  relation  to  Concord  and  of  his 
beautiful  and  fruitful  life;  he  came  to  Nature 
as  to  the  word  of  God,  and  he  gave  the  world 
only  the  ripe  fruit  of  his  quiet,  meditative,  con- 
secrated life.  The  twin  activities  of  his  spirit 
found  their  field  and  their  inspiration  under  the 
open  sky.  He  played  with  Nature  and  she 
worked  with  him.  With  him,  as  with  Words- 
worth, his  working-room  was  out-doors;  his 
writing-room  was  the  place  where  he  made  a 
record  of  his  hours  and  studies  under  the  open 
sky.  No  season  barred  the  woods  to  his  eager 
feet ;  he  was  abroad  in  winter  as  in  summer,  and 
he  loved  lonely  walks  at  night,  finding  compan- 
ionship with  the  stars  full  of  inspiration. 

The  pine  woods  brought  him  some  of  his  hap- 
piest moods  and  many  of  his  most  felicitous 
thoughts  and  phrases.  In  all  weathers  he  went 
abroad  alert  and  expectant,  waiting  serenely 

89 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

and  confidently  on  the  ancient  oracles;  and, 
holding  himself  in  this  trustful,  receptive  atti- 
tude, the  pines  became  for  him 

Pipes  through  which  the  brcatli  of  God  doth  blow 
A  momentary  music. 

Thoreau,  keen  observer  though  he  was,  took 
into  the  woods  a  personality  which  affected  his 
vision  and  made  him  the  most  conspicuous  ob- 
ject in  the  landscape;  Emerson  left  himself  at 
home  and  brought  to  Nature  the  most  receptive 
and  impersonal  of  moods.  He  saw  fewer 
things  than  Thoreau,  but  he  saw  more  deeply. 
"  But  if  I  go  into  the  forest,"  he  wrote,  "  I  fuid 
all  new  and  undescribed;  nothing  has  been  told 
me.  The  screaming  of  wild  geese  was  never 
heard ;  the  thin  note  of  the  titmouse  and  his  bold 
ignoring  of  the  bystander;  the  fall  of  the  flies 
that  patter  on  the  leaves  like  rain;  the  angry 
hiss  of  some  bird  that  crepitated  at  me  yes- 
terday; the  formation  of  turpentine,  and,  in- 
deed, every  vegetation  and  animation,  any  and 
all,  are  alike  undescribed.  Every  man  that 
goes  into  the  woods  seems  to  be  the  fii'st  man 

90 


EMERSON  AND  CONCORD 

that  ever  went  into  a  wood.  His  sensations  and 
his  world  are  new.  You  really  think  that  no- 
thing can  be  said  about  morning  and  evening, 
and  the  fact  is,  morning  and  evening  have  not 
yet  begun  to  be  described.  When  I  see  them 
I  am  not  reminded  of  these  Homeric  or  Mil- 
tonic  or  Shakespearian  or  Chaucerian  pictures, 
but  I  feel  a  pain  of  an  alien  world,  or  I  am 
cheered  with  the  moist,  warm,  glittering,  bud- 
ding, and  melodious  hour  that  takes  down  the 
narrow  walls  of  my  soul  and  extends  its  pulsa- 
tion and  life  to  the  very  horizon.  That  is 
Morning;  to  cease  for  a  bright  hour  to  be  the 
prisoner  of  this  sickly  body  and  to  become  as 
large  as  the  World." 

Compare  this  account  of  the  attitude  which 
Emerson  took  toward  Nature  with  the  fra- 
grant, dewy,  glowing  account  of  a  day  under 
the  pure  sky  which  Corot  left  among  his  rec- 
ords, and  the  secret  of  spiritual  and  artistic 
vitality  and  freshness  is  plain.  The  men  of 
genius,  who  recreate  life  in  art  to  assuage  the 
thirst  and  renew  the  heart  of  the  world,  are  im- 
mortal not  only  in  their  works  but  in  them- 

91 


EMERSON    AND    CONCORD 

selves;  for  they  are  the  children  of  God,  play- 
ing in  a  world  in  which  their  fellows  toil.  It  is 
their  happy  lot  to  see  all  things  afresh  and  keep 
the  world  young. 

There  was  a  garden  on  the  south  side  of  the 
Emerson  house,  and  apple-trees  brought  the 
most  ancient  fragrance  and  domestic  associa- 
tions to  the  place;  but  Emerson  was  more  at 
home  in  the  broad  landscape  which  inclosed 
his  own  acres.  What  the  old  road  over  the  hill 
to  Grasmere  and  Loughrigg  Terrace  were  to 
Wordsworth  in  the  long  years  at  Rydal  Mount, 
the  Great  Fields  and  Meadows,  the  shores  and 
groves  of  white  pine  about  Walden  Pond, 
Peters  Field,  and  the  level  stretches  through 
which  the  Musketaquid,  most  quiet  of  rivers, 
flows,  were  to  Emerson  during  the  most  fruit- 
ful period  of  his  life.  He  found  endless  de- 
light in  the  ownership  of  a  tract  of  land  from 
which  he  could  look  down  on  Walden  Pond 
and  away  to  the  farther  hills : 

My  garden  is  a  forest  ledge 

Which  older  forests  bound; 
The  banks  slope  down  to  the  blue  lake-edge. 
Then  plunge  to  depths  profound. 

92 


EMERSON  AND  CONCORD 

Self-sown  my  stately  garden  grows; 

The  wind,  and  wind-blown  seed, 
Cold  April  rain  and  colder  snows. 

My  hedges  plant  and  feed. 

Emerson  was  not  a  successful  farmer, 
though  he  had  the  respect  of  the  practical 
farmers  about  him,  and  was  known  as  "  a  first- 
rate  neighbor  and  one  who  always  kept  his 
fences  up  "  ;  his  business  was  not  with  the  acres, 
but  with  the  landscape.  No  one  ever  took  am- 
pler or  nobler  harvests  of  the  spirit  off  the  land 
than  Emerson.  He  had  a  keen  eye  for  the 
small  facts  of  natural  life,  but  he  cared 
chiefly  for  the  vital  processes,  the  flooding  life, 
the  revelation  of  truth,  the  correspondence  of 
soul  between  man  and  Nature;  he  was,  in  a 
word,  the  poet  in  the  woods  and  fields.  With 
serene  faith  and  loyal  fellowship  he  kept 
friends  with  Nature  from  youth  to  age,  and  the 
joy  of  his  intimacy  suffered  no  shadow  of  es- 
trangement as  the  years  went  by.  A  walk  in 
the  woods,  he  declared,  was  "  one  of  the  secrets 
for  dodging  old  age  "  ;  and  in  an  address  "  To 
the  Woods  "  he  wrote :  "  Whoso  goeth  in  your 
paths  readeth  the  same  cheerful  lesson,  whether 

95 


EMERSON  AND  CONCORD 

he  be  a  young  child  or  a  hundred  years  old.  .  .  . 
Give  me  a  tune  like  your  winds  or  brooks  or 
birds,  for  the  songs  of  men  grow  old,  when  they 
are  uprooted;  but  yours,  though  a  man  have 
heard  them  for  seventy  years,  are  never  the 
same,  but  always  new,  like  Time  itself,  or  like 
love." 

To  the  very  end  this  devout  lover  of  Nature 
lived  in  daily  intercourse  with  her,  and  it  was 
during  a  walk  in  a  cold  April  rain  that  he  con- 
tracted the  illness  which  proved  fatal  after  a 
few  days  of  sitting  in  his  chair  by  the  fire  calmly 
waiting  for  death.  In  tlie  quiet  place  where  he 
lies,  near  Hawthorne  and  Thoreau,  the  pines 
seem  to  be  always  whispering  among  them- 
selves ;  but,  alas !  there  is  no  longer  one  who  un- 
derstands them. 


96 


THE  WASHINGTON  IRVING 
COUNTRY 


THE   WASHINGTON   IRVING 
COUNTRY 


RVING  and  Longfellow 
were  primarily  translators 
and  interpreters  of  the  Old 
World  to  the  New;  to  them 
was  due  in  large  measure  the 
liberation  of  the  young  na- 
tion from  provincialism,  not 
by  the  use  of  fresh  motives  or  of  novel  literary 
forms,  but  by  bringing  the  American  imagina- 
tion in  touch  with  the  imagination  of  Europe, 
and  reknitting  the  deeper  ties  which  had  been,  in 
a  way,  severed  by  forcible  separation  from  Old 
World  rule.  There  was,  in  the  first  three  dec- 
ades of  the  nineteenth  century,  general  depen- 
dence on  European  literature  and  general  def  er- 

101 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

ence  to  European  taste;  a  dependence  from 
which  Emerson  and  Poe,  by  definite  and  urgent 
teaching  as  well  as  by  practice  of  art  with  that 
freshness  and  force  which  always  form  another 
beginning,  finally  effected  our  liberation. 

This  deferential  attitude,  this  imitative  spirit, 
had  nothing  in  common  with  that  assimilation 
of  the  experience,  sentiment,  poetic  association, 
and  historic  charm  of  the  older  civilization  which 
Irving  and  Ijongfellow  effected.  They  assisted 
in  the  emancipation  from  servile  imitation  by 
greatly  forwarding  the  equalization  of  the  con- 
ditions of  culture  between  the  Old  World  and 
the  New,  and  by  bringing  the  New  into  spiritual 
sympathy  with  the  Old.  This  work  was  differ- 
ent from  that  of  Emerson  and  Poe,  but  Irving 
and  Longfellow  share  the  distinction  of  break- 
ing the  formal  while  reuniting  the  vital  ties,  and 
thus  preparing  the  way  for  the  free  interchange 
of  influence  on  a  basis  of  equality  which  to-day 
constitutes  the  rich  spiritual  commerce  between 
the  Old  World  and  the  New.  To  this  great  end 
Cooper  was  also  a  strenuous  and  effective 
worker;  failing  dismally  when  he  tried  the  role 
of  interpreter  in  "  Precaution,"  succeeding  on 

102 


The  Entrance  to  Sleepy  Hollow 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

original  lines  when  he  portrayed  the  fresh  expe- 
riences and  characteristic  types  of  the  new  so- 
ciety in  "  The  Spy  "  and  "  The  Leatherstock- 
ing  Tales." 

But  while  Irving  and  Longfellow  were  trans- 
lators in  a  high  sense  and  with  fresh  feeling  of 
the  Old  World  to  the  New,  they  were  also  origi- 
nal forces  in  the  literature  of  the  new  country. 
Their  urbanity,  geniality,  hospitality  of  mind, 
and  sweetness  of  nature  gave  them  rare  sensi- 
tiveness of  feeling  for  things  old  and  ripe  and 
beautiful  and  a  winning  quality  of  style;  quali- 
ties which,  among  a  people  whose  literature,  dur- 
ing its  first  important  period,  was  to  carry  sug- 
gestions of  the  pulpit  with  it,  have  tended 
somewhat  to  obscure  their  originality  and  sig- 
nificance. Longfellow  was  so  gentle  a  preacher 
that,  aside  from  a  few  poems  so  frankly  didac- 
tic that  we  forgive  their  exhortations  for  the  sake 
of  the  pure  impulse  they  convey,  the  bands  and 
gown  are  concealed  under  the  singer's  robes; 
while  Irving's  preaching  was  wholly  the  silent 
influence  of  one  of  the  finest,  kindliest,  and 
truest  of  men.  In  the  preponderance  of  ethical 
over  artistic  interests  in  this  country  Longfellow 

105 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

and  Irving  have  carried  less  weight  and  made 
less  impression  than  writers  of  more  urgent  ethi- 
cal impulse  but  of  far  less  poetic  and  literary 
power.  When  a  great  deal  of  current  writing 
has  been  forgotten,  and  much  that  Irving  and 
Longfellow  wrote  has  passed  into  the  same  obli- 
vion, it  is  safe  to  predict  that  "  The  Legend  of 
Sleepy  Hollow  "  and  "  Rip  Van  Winkle,"  and 
*'  Evangeline  "  and  "  Hiawatha,"  will  hold  their 
own  because  of  their  quality  as  literature  and 
because  they  are  part  of  the  very  limited  legen- 
dary lore  of  America.  Irving  gave  permanent 
form  to  the  Knickerbocker  tradition  when  he 
created  Diedrich  Knickerbocker  and  Rip  Van 
AVinkle;  and  in  "  The  Legend  of  Sleepy  Hol- 
low "  he  was  not  only  the  forerunner  of  the 
American  novelist  but  the  first  American  myth- 
maker. 

Like  Longfellow  and  Cooper,  he  was  often  in 
Europe ;  and  it  may  be  suspected  that  when  these 
writers  were  young,  and  for  a  long  time  after, 
the  new  country  was  a  lonely  place  for  men  who 
craved  richness  and  beauty  of  life,  the  charm  of 
old  association,  the  ripeness  of  a  society  which 
had  gotten  through  with  foundation-laying,  had 

106 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

built  its  roads,  and  had  passed  on  to  love  things 
which  are  beautiful  as  well  as  to  do  things  which 
are  useful. 

Born  in  1783,  in  the  cosmopolitan  city  of  New 
York,  where  even  at  that  early  period  eighteen 
or  twenty  languages  were  spoken,  Irving  went 
to  Europe  in  search  of  health  in  his  twenty- 
second  year;  saw  something  of  France,  Italy, 
Holland,  and  England;  enjoying  with  the 
freshness  of  a  young  imagination  nature,  art, 
society,  and  life.  "  I  am  a  young  man  and  in 
Paris,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend  at  home.  Returning 
to  New  York  in  1806,  he  took  his  place  at  once 
in  the  little  group  of  wits  and  men-about-town, 
in  the  good  sense  of  the  phrase,  of  which  Pauld- 
ing, Brevoort,  Henry  Ogden,  and  the  Kembles 
were  members — a  spirited,  vivacious  company, 
with  great  capacity  for  enjoyment  and  with 
gifts  of  humor  and  satire  which,  under  the  influ- 
ence of  Goldsmith,  Addison,  and  the  eighteenth- 
century  essayists,  were  soon  at  work  in  the  little 
city  "  to  instruct  the  young,  inform  the  old,  cor- 
rect the  town,  and  castigate  the  age,"  to  quote 
from  "  Salmagundi,"  which  ran  its  meteoric 
course  in  twenty  numbers  and  then  vanished  in 

107 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

the  mystery  from  which  it  had  come.  When 
"The  History  of  New  York  by  Diedrich  Knick- 
erbocker "  appeared,  it  reminded  Walter  Scott 
of  Dean  Swift  and  of  Sterne. 

In  1815  Irving  went  to  Europe  for  the  second 
time,  and  seventeen  years  passed  before  he  set 
foot  in  his  native  city  again.  During  this  period 
he  wrote  "  The  Sketch-Book,"  a  collection  of 
essays  in  his  most  characteristic  vein,  urbane, 
genial,  full  not  only  of  Old  World  atmosphere, 
Old  World  grace,  ease,  mellowness  of  reflec- 
tion, and  sentiment,  but  full  also  of  New  World 
feeling.  "  Bracebridge  Hall  "  brought  the  fra- 
grance of  old  gardens  and  the  dignity  of  old 
homes  once  more  to  the  children  of  the  men 
and  women  who  had  left  them  behind  two  cen- 
turies before;  "  The  Tales  of  a  Traveler,"  which 
appeared  two  years  later  and  was  read  with 
eager  interest,  dealt  with  old  things,  but  was  full 
of  novelty  to  the  untraveled  America  of  the 
third  decade  of  the  last  century.  "  The  Life  of 
Columbus  "  was  begun,  and  "  The  Tales  of  the 
Alhambra  "  and  "  The  Conquest  of  Granada  " 
were  finished,  during  this  long  residence  abroad ; 
and  when  he  returned,  in  1832,  Irving's  most 

108 


On  Sleepy  Hollow  Bpook 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

characteristic  work  was  done.  He  was  still  to 
write  "  The  Life  of  Washington,"  "  Mahomet 
and  his  Successors,"  the  charming  account  of 
Goldsmith,  and  other  books;  but  he  struck  no 
new  notes  and  disclosed  no  new  qualities  as  a 
writer. 

At  first  glance  it  would  seem  as  if  Irving's 
work  had  been  done  against  many  backgrounds, 
English  and  Spanish  as  well  as  American,  and 
as  if  his  note  had  been  cosmopolitan  rather  than 
American.  The  real  Irving,  however,  was  a 
true  son  of  the  country  of  which  New  York  is 
the  capital,  and  his  characteristic  and  abiding 
work  had  behind  it  a  city,  a  river,  and  a  moun- 
tain range  which  were  not  simply  the  stage  set- 
ting of  his  life,  but  which  gave  color,  atmo- 
sphere, tone,  to  his  writing.  As  a  translator 
Irving  rendered  a  great  service  to  his  country, 
and  enriched  its  literature  with  the  meditations 
on  Westminster  Abbey,  the  description  of 
Stratford-on-Avon,  and  the  group  of  studies  of 
English  life  and  landscape  in  "  Bracebridge 
Hall  " ;  but  the  Irving  who  will  be  known  to  the 
future  will  be  the  Geoffrey  Crayon  of  the 
Knickerbocker  city,  and  the  books  which  will 

111 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

live  longest,  because  they  are  in  material  and 
manner  most  completely  his  own,  will  be  the 
legends  of  the  Hudson. 

His  kindly  and  pervasive  humor  had  as  little 
in  common  with  the  keen,  pungent  New  Eng- 
land humor  as  his  genial  and  urbane  spirit  had 
with  the  strenuous,  ethical  temper  of  New  Eng- 
land. The  rigidity  of  the  Puritan,  the  concen- 
tration of  the  reformer,  were  entirely  alien  to  his 
tolerant  nature.  The  intense  feeling  for  the 
locality,  the  emphasis  on  the  section,  characteris- 
tic of  the  South  from  a  very  early  period,  were 
equally  alien  to  him.  He  was  a  true  child  of  the 
metropolis;  tolerant  in  temper  because  he  was 
on  easy  terms  with  many  different  races,  urbane 
and  gracious  because  he  had  found  virtue  in 
many  kinds  of  men,  charm  in  many  kinds  of 
women,  and  sincerity  in  many  kinds  of  religion ; 
with  a  vein  of  deep  and  tender  feeling  i*unning 
through  his  nature  and  his  work,  but  always  re- 
lieving the  strain  of  emotion  with  that  touch  of 
humor  which  makes  men  kin.  The  qualities  of 
the  cosmopolitan  city  were  all  his:  urbanity  of 
manner,  breadth  of  view,  tolerance  of  temper, 
and  a  kindl5%  easy,  genial  attitude  towards  life. 

112 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

The  atmosphere  of  the  New  York  of  the  first 
quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  penetrates 
Irving's  work  as  thoroughly  as  the  air  of  Ayr- 
shire breathes  through  the  songs  of  Burns,  as 
the  lonely  loveliness  and  the  wild  ruggedness  of 
Trossachs  and  lakes  appear  and  vanish  and  re- 
appear in  picture  and  vision  in  Scott's  prose  and 
verse,  and  the  multitudinous  murmur  of  waters 
of  Cumberlandshire  is  heard  in  the  poems  of 
Wordsworth. 

There  was  no  strain  of  didacticism  in  Irving, 
but  there  was  an  attitude  towards  life  which  gave 
his  work  a  beautiful  quality  of  sympathy.  "  If, 
however,  I  can  by  a  lucky  chance,  in  these  days 
of  evil,  rub  out  one  wrinkle  from  the  brow  of 
care,  or  beguile  the  heavy  heart  of  one  moment 
of  sadness ;  if  I  can,  now  and  then,  penetrate  the 
gathering  film  of  misanthropy,  prompt  a  be- 
nevolent view  of  human  nature,  and  make  my 
reader  more  in  good  humor  with  his  fellow- 
beings  and  himself,  surely,  surely  I  shall  not 
then  have  written  in  vain." 

This  is  the  temper  of  the  true  citizen  of  a  me- 
tropolis— a  place  where  races  meet  and  mingle 
on  easy  terms;  slowly  and  often  blindly,  but 

113 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

none  the  less  surely,  through  mutual  compre- 
hension and  the  tolerance  that  comes  from  it, 
defining  in  terms  of  experience  the  unity  of  the 
race  and  realizing  the  brotherhood  of  man.  And 
it  was  still  in  the  cosmopolitan  temper  that  Ir- 
ving wrote  to  a  friend:  "  I  have  preferred  ad- 
dressing myself  to  the  feelings  and  fancy  of  the 
reader  more  than  to  his  judgment.  My  writings 
may  appear,  therefore,  light  and  trifling  in  our 
country  of  philosophers  and  politicians.  But 
if  they  possess  merit  in  the  class  of  literature 
to  which  they  belong,  it  is  all  to  which  I  aspire 
in  the  work." 

There  was  something  of  this  breadth  of  hu- 
mor, this  love  of  literature  for  itself  and  not 
as  a  tool  for  the  preacher  and  the  reformer,  this 
old-fashioned,  kindly,  easy-going  metropolitan 
temper,  in  the  aspect  and  bearing  of  the  man. 
"  Forty  years  ago,"  writes  Mr.  Curtis,  "  upon 
a  pleasant  afternoon,  you  might  have  seen  trip- 
ping with  an  elastic  step  along  Broadway,  in 
New  York,  a  figure  which  even  then  would  have 
been  called  quaint.  It  was  a  man  of  about  sixty- 
six  or  sixty-seven  years  old,  of  a  rather  solid 
frame,  wearing  a  Talma,  as  a  siiort  coat  of  the 

114) 


Old  Willows  near  Tarrjtown 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

time  was  called,  that  hung  from  the  shoulders, 
and  low  shoes,  neatly  tied,  which  were  observable 
at  a  time  when  boots  were  generally  worn.  The 
head  was  slightly  inclined  to  one  side,  the  face 
was  smoothly  shaven,  and  the  eyes  twinkled 
with  kindly  humor  and  shrewdness.  There  was 
a  chirping,  cheery,  old-school  air  in  the  whole 
appearance,  an  undeniable  Dutch  aspect,  which, 
in  the  streets  of  New  Amsterdam,  irresistibly 
recalled  Diedrich  Knickerbocker.  .  .  .  This 
modest  and  kindly  man  was  the  creator  of  Died- 
rich Knickerbocker  and  Rip  Van  Winkle.  He 
was  the  father  of  our  literature  and  at  that  time 
its  patriarch." 

New  York  was  a  little  city  of  about  twenty- 
five  thousand  inhabitants,  living  well  below  the 
site  of  the  present  City  Hall,  when  Irving  was 
born  in  a  house  on  William  Street,  between 
Fulton  and  John,  and  christened  in  St.  George's 
Chapel  in  Beekman  Street.  He  went  to  school 
in  Ann  and  Fulton  streets,  but  he  was  given 
more  to  wandering  about  the  pier-heads  and 
watching  incoming  and  outgoing  ships  in  fair 
weather  than  to  orderly  study.  He  came  to 
know  the  little  city  intimately  in  its  most  char- 

117 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

acteristic  aspects  and  localities ;  for  the  loitering 
of  an  imaginative  boy  is  a  golden  opportunity 
of  getting  at  the  heart  of  things.  In  this  same 
blissful  mood,  while  the  mind  was  still  much 
more  concerned  with  the  face  of  the  world  than 
with  its  own  thoughts,  he  explored  the  secluded 
and  solitary  recesses  of  Sleepy  Hollow  and  felt 
the  quieting  beauty  of  Tappan  Zee  on  summer 
afternoons.  A  little  later  he  made  his  first  voy- 
age up  the  Hudson  on  a  sloop — a  voyage  which 
was  then  more  unusual  and  exciting  than  a  voy- 
age across  the  Atlantic  is  to-day,  and  quite  as 
long: 

"  Of  all  the  scenery  of  the  Hudson,"  he  wrote  years 
afterwards,  "  the  Kaatskill  Mountains  had  the  most 
witching  effect  on  my  boyish  imagination.  Never  shall 
I  forget  the  effect  on  me  of  my  first  view  of  them  pre- 
dominating over  a  wide  extent  of  country,  part  wild, 
woody,  and  rugged ;  part  softened  away  into  all  the 
graces  of  cultivation.  As  we  slowly  floated  along,  I  lay 
on  the  deck  and  watched  them  through  a  long  summer's 
day,  undergoing  a  thousand  mutations  under  the  magi- 
cal effects  of  atmosphere;  sometimes  seeming  to  ap- 
proach, at  other  times  to  recede;  now  almost  melting 
into  hazy  distance,  now  burnished  by  the  setting  sun, 
until  in  the  evening  they  printed  themselves  against  the 
glowing  sky   in  the  deep  purple  of  an  Italian   land- 

118 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

scape.  ...  To  me  the  Hudson  is  full  of  storied  asso- 
ciations, connected  as  it  is  with  some  of  the  happiest 
portions  of  my  life.  Each  striking  feature  brings  to 
mind  some  early  adventure  or  enjoyment;  some  favorite 
companion  who  shared  it  with  me;  some  fair  object, 
perchance,  of  youthful  admiration,  who,  like  a  star,  may 
have  beamed  her  allotted  time  and  passed  away." 

This  first  voyage  up  the  river  with  which  he 
will  always  be  associated  was  as  truly  a  voyage 
of  discovery  as  was  Hendrik  Hudson's  in  1609; 
and  it  was  the  river  in  its  entirety,  its  large  lines, 
its  atmosphere,  rather  than  its  details  of  curving 
shore  and  climbing  hill,  the  sweep  of  its  power- 
ful tide,  that  took  possession  of  the  boy's  im- 
agination, and  became  as  much  a  part  of  his  life 
of  the  mind  and  of  his  work  as  the  mountains 
about  Cadore  were  a  part  of  the  mind  and  work 
of  Titian.  It  was  not  until  April,  1835,  that  he 
purchased  Sunnyside,  that  secluded  and  fra- 
grant spot  where  he  found  such  peace  in  his  later 
years ;  and  "  Rip  Van  Winkle  "  had  been  pub- 
lished twelve  years  before  its  author  set  foot  in 
the  country  which  he  had  described  more  vitally 
than  any  other  traveler  has  ever  done. 

From  the  early  days  of  his  dreaming  boyhood 
119 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

Irving  knew  the  river  in  its  large  outlines,  its 
noble  molding  of  shore,  its  harmony  of  different 
types  of  landscape  composed  in  one  great  pic- 
ture, its  atmosphere  and  its  associations.  "  Rip 
Van  Winkle "  and  "  The  Legend  of  Sleepy 
Hollow,"  the  most  original  and  characteristic  of 
Irving's  creations,  were  written  in  England 
during  the  period  when  he  was  transcribing  with 
a  sensitive  and  sympathetic  hand  the  ripe  loveli- 
ness of  the  English  country  and  the  rich  associa- 
tions of  ancient  structures  and  localities ;  but  the 
Hudson  valley,  from  the  city  at  its  conflux  with 
the  Bay  to  the  fastnesses  of  the  Catskills,  was 
the  background  against  which  his  imagination 
was  working,  because  it  was  the  background  of 
his  childhood. 

It  is  now,  perhaps,  somewhat  a  matter  of  as- 
sociation, but  there  is  a  certain  congruity  be- 
tween Irving's  work  and  his  country.  In  his 
attitude  towards  his  fellows,  his  bearing  in  the 
world,  Geoffrey  Crayon  bore  the  impress  of  the 
little  metropolis  which  he  has  made  for  all  time 
the  city  of  the  Knickerbockers;  for,  although 
Diedrich  Knickerbocker  has  never  been  seen 
since  he  climbed  into  the  Albany  stage  leaving 

120 


\ 


e 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

his  bill  at  the  tavern  unpaid,  he  has  left  his  name 
and  the  tradition  of  his  quaint  personality  to 
the  great  metropolis  to-day  as  its  one  touch  of 
mythology — a  bit  of  fable  symbolical  of  a  past 
which  has  been  buried  under  crushing  masses  of 
stone  and  iron.  In  the  free  play  of  Irving's  im- 
agination, in  the  geniality  of  his  humor,  in  the 
ease  and  leisureliness  of  his  mood,  the  character- 
istics of  the  larger  background  of  his  life  are 
constantly  suggested.  If  the  Puritans  had  dis- 
covered the  Hudson  and  turned  its  shores  and 
current  to  thrifty  account,  it  might  have  sug- 
gested movement,  energy,  the  stir  of  active 
races ;  it  suggests  instead  repose,  quietness,  long 
summer  days  of  a  temperature  which  predis- 
poses to  acceptance  of  what  fortune  brings 
rather  than  resolute  grappling  with  adverse 
conditions.  Sunnyside  wears  its  name,  after  all 
these  years  and  changes,  with  gracious  assur- 
ance. Approached  by  a  long  shaded  lane  and 
embowered  by  trees,  it  still  looks  the  summer  in 
the  face  in  the  broad  expanse  of  Tappan  Zee. 

It  was  a  happy  stroke  of  felicitous  description 
which  called  the  quiet  little  vale  where  the  Po- 
cantico  takes  its  rise  Sleepy  Hollow;  a  place  as 

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WASHIXGTOX  IRVING  COUNTRY 

reposeful,  after  all  these  bustling  and  hurrying 
years,  as  it  was  in  the  days  when  Irving  first 
described  its  pastoral  somnambulance;  a  place 
not  so  much  for  meditation  as  for  those  reveries 
which  come  between  sleep  and  awakening  and 
add  the  charm  of  consciousness  to  the  sensuous 
delight  of  sleep. 

And  although  the  Catskills  have  mass  and  no- 
bility of  line  which  produce  an  impression  out 
of  proportion  to  their  actual  magnitude,  they 
have  friendliness  of  aspect,  an  air  of  quiet  hos- 
pitality, a  something  which  eludes  analysis, 
which  imposes  respect  and  yet  invites  famili- 
arity. On  summer  afternoons  they  seem  to  sleep 
against  the  western  sky;  and  a  well-known 
artist,  who  has  lived  with  them  on  terms  of  in- 
timacy for  many  years,  is  in  the  habit  of  saying 
that  they  frame  the  most  magnificent  sunsets  in 
the  world.  They  stand  revealed  in  their  mys- 
tery of  noble  repose  only  in  the  hours  when  the 
shadows  lengthen  and  the  light  loses  its  garish- 
ness ;  they  are  most  expressive  in  the  afternoon, 
when  they  seem  sometimes  to  float  in  a  mist  of 
heat  and  to  bound  the  horizon  of  the  actual  like 
noble  visions  of  a  world  in  which  the  light  flows 

124 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

like  molten  gold.  The  White  Mountains  be- 
come bolder  in  the  high  light  of  morning,  and 
invite  strenuous  approach  and  hint  at  great, 
positive  rewards  for  the  climber. 

In  October  the  Catskills  hold  the  very  genius 
of  the  season  in  their  keeping;  so  deep  is  the 
quiet  that  enfolds  them,  so  rich  the  atmosphere 
in  which  they  lie,  removed  at  times  as  in  a  radi- 
ant mirage  and  again  distinct  in  softened  line 
and  golden  distance. 

Mr.  Curtis  has  said,  in  pardonable  poetic 
phrase,  that  the  Rhine  is  lyrical  and  the  Hudson 
epical.  The  Rhine  is  beautiful  in  localities,  ro- 
mantic, picturesque,  entirely  apart  from  their 
manifold  associations.  The  Hudson  is  beauti- 
ful in  its  totality,  its  sustained  interest,  its  sin- 
gular harmony  in  diversity,  its  impressive  con- 
tinuity of  changing  landscapes  blending  into  a 
nobly  composed  picture.  The  Rhine  has  a  swift 
current  and  gives  one  a  sense  of  movement  and 
agitation;  the  Hudson  flows  so  quietly  that  its 
very  motion  seems  part  of  the  stillness.  On  a 
summer  day  the  voyage  which  Irving  made  as 
a  boy  with  kindling  imagination  can  be  made 
between  dawn  and  sunset,  and  takes  one  through 

125 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

a  valley  in  which  it  seems  to  be  always  afternoon. 
There  is  activitj^  of  many  kinds  on  either  bank 
and  on  the  surface  of  the  river,  but  in  the  spa- 
ciousness of  stream  and  landscape  the  hum  and 
stir  are  resolved  into  all-embracing  silence,  and 
the  quietness  of  Sleepy  Hollow  broods  over 
wooded  shores,  distant  hills,  and  flowing  water. 

The  acquaintance  with  the  Hudson  made 
w^hen  Irving  was  a  boy  was  renewed  and  deep- 
ened when  he  finally  returned  from  Europe  in 
1832,  after  an  absence  of  seventeen  years.  New 
York  had  grown  into  what  seemed  to  him  a  vast 
city ;  a  few  years  later  he  described  it  in  a  letter 
to  a  friend  as  a  "great  crowded  metropolis  .  .  . 
full  of  life,  bustle,  noise,  show,  and  splendor, .  .  . 
one  of  the  most  racketing  cities  in  the  world." 
One  wonders  what  he  would  think  of  the  roar- 
ing vortex  of  life  which  the  slow  little  town  of 
the  forties,  when  this  description  was  written, 
has  become  in  these  times  of  rebuilding  on  a 
scale  which  would  have  appalled  the  magicians 
of  "  The  Arabian  Nights." 

Sunnyside  was  already  old  when  he  made  it 
a  retreat  from  the  tumult  of  the  city  and  began 
the  process  of  enlargement  which  has  adapted 

126 


n    \ 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

the  ancient  house  to  modern  needs  without  sacri- 
ficing its  old-time  charm.  "  My  own  place  has 
never  been  so  beautiful  as  at  present,"  he  wrote 
years  later.  "  I  have  made  more  openings  by 
pruning  and  cutting  down  trees,  so  that  from 
the  piazza  I  have  several  charming  views  of  the 
Tappan  Zee  and  the  hills  beyond,  all  set,  as  it 
were,  in  verdant  frames;  and  I  am  never  tired 
of  sitting  there  in  my  old  Voltaire  chair,  of  a 
long  summer  morning,  with  a  book  in  my  hand, 
sometimes  reading,  sometimes  musing,  and 
sometimes  dozing,  and  mixing  up  all  in  a  plea- 
sant dream."  A  beautiful  picture,  surely,  of 
the  old  age  of  a  man  of  letters  who  continued 
the  tradition  of  the  ripeness  of  spirit,  the  medi- 
tative temper,  geniality,  and  humor,  which  has 
never  lapsed  among  the  English-speaking 
peoples. 

In  those  years  when  the  Albany  stages  were 
making  their  last  trips  and  the  mild  thunder  of 
the  first  railroad  trains  began  to  wake  the  echoes 
of  the  Highlands  and  disturb  the  slumbers  of 
the  Rip  Van  Winkles  who  have  never  been  lack- 
ing in  the  old  towns  of  Dutch  origin,  Irving  was 
enriching  the  Hudson  with  literary  and  personal 

129 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

associations  and  making  it  a  place  of  pilgrimage, 
but  his  own  associations  with  it  lay  far  back  in 
his  boyhood.  In  the  later  years  it  was  the  back- 
ground of  his  personal  life ;  in  his  early  years  it 
was  the  background  of  his  life  of  imagination 
and  sentiment,  of  his  dawning  consciousness  of 
his  gifts  and  his  vocation,  of  his  gentle  and  re- 
sponsive but  essentially  robust  spirit.  He  lived 
at  Sunnyside,  he  worshiped  at  Christ  Church  in 
the  beautiful  old  village  of  Tarrytown,  and  he 
lies  at  rest  in  Sleepy  Hollow  Cemetery:  these 
are  the  obvious  associations  of  the  man  with  the 
country  which  will  long  bear  his  name.  To  find 
his  deeper  and  more  vital  connections  with  the 
Hudson  valley  one  must  go  back  to  his  youth,  to 
his  earlier  books,  to  the  heart  of  his  work.  Its 
beauty,  always  reposeful  and  in  summer  touched 
with  elusive  dreaminess,  went  home  to  his  young 
imagination  and  reappeared  again  and  again  in 
charming  description,  in  two  legends  which  have 
taken  their  places  among  our  classics,  not  only 
because  of  the  charm  of  their  form,  but  because 
they  are  penetrated  with  the  very  spirit  of  the 
region  they  portray,  and  in  the  quietness,  the 
sensitiveness  to  old  associations,  the  charity  for 

130 


WASHINGTON  IRVING  COUNTRY 

that  ease  which  the  strenuous  New  England 
temper  called  by  another  name,  the  pervading 
humor  which  is  never  obtrusive  or  boisterous  but 
is  full  of  heart  and  fellowship,  the  happy  blend- 
ing of  dignity  and  graciousness,  and  the  modu- 
lated cadence  of  English  speech  in  his  work. 

In  the  long  future  there  may  come  a  Hudson 
of  new  associations;  a  river  freighted  with  the 
traffic  of  a  valley  which  has  become  a  continuous 
city  from  its  mouth  to  the  foothills  of  the  Adi- 
rondacks.  In  that  day  some  writer  may  appear 
whose  work  will  echo  the  multitudinous  voices 
of  countless  factories  and  the  murmur  of  a  vast 
population.  But  for  many  a  year  to  come  the 
Hudson  which  Hendrik  explored  as  the  herald 
of  a  host  of  sturdy  Dutch  settlers,  the  Hudson 
of  long  decades  of  slumberous  plenty,  of  stately 
and  humble  homes — the  Hudson  of  three  cen- 
turies— will  flow  through  Irving's  country,  and 
remain  typical  of  his  genius ;  the  background  of 
his  art  and  life. 


131 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 


WEIMAR  AND  GOETHE 


1 

mi 

1 

HE  one  hundred  and  fifty- 
fourth  anniversary  of  the 
birth  of  Goethe,  which  fell 
on  the  28th  day  of  last  Au- 
gust, found  Weimar  not  only 
eager  to  honor  the  memory 
of  the  great  poet  who  was 
for  fifty-six  years  its  best-known  resident,  and 
is  likely  to  remain  to  the  end  of  time  its  most 
illustrious  citizen,  but  essentially  unchanged 
since  his  death  in  1832.  Even  in  a  quiet  Ger- 
man town,  off  the  great  highways  of  travel, 
changes  must  come  in  seventy -one  years ;  and  if 
Goethe  were  to  step  out  of  his  old  home  to-day 
and  walk  to  the  grand-ducal  palace,  rebuilt  in 
part  under  his  own  direction,  he  would  doubtless 

137 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

come  upon  unfamiliar  sights.  But  AVeimar  re- 
mains in  essentials  a  town  of  the  old  time: 
quaint,  thoroughly  German,  and  rich  in  associa- 
tion, not  only  with  great  men,  but  with  some 
of  the  earliest  statements  of  the  modern  concep- 
tion of  the  relation  of  art  to  life. 

The  little  town  is  preeminently  fitted  to  be 
the  custodian  of  literary  traditions.  It  has  an 
old-time  dignity  of  bearing,  as  if  it  had  always 
been  the  mother  of  great  spirits.  The  quiet  Ilm, 
flowing  through  its  domain,  is  sacredly  guarded 
along  its  entire  com-se  on  both  shores  by  a  charm- 
ing park;  the  homes  of  the  poets  are  piously  re- 
garded; and  there  are  worthy  memorials  of 
greatness  in  public  places.  The  statue  of  Her- 
der, one  of  the  purest  and  most  penetrating  of 
modern  minds,  stands  in  front  of  the  Stadt- 
Kirche,  and  bears  his  favorite  and  very  charac- 
teristic motto,  Licht,  Liehe,  JLehen;  in  front  of 
the  theater  Goethe  and  Schiller  are  commemo- 
rated in  a  noble  group;  the  Grand  Duke  Au- 
gustus, in  an  equestrian  statue,  wears  the  laurel 
secured  for  him  by  the  great  spirits  whom 
he  had  the  sagacity  to  recognize  and  bring 
into  his  service;  while  Wieland  is  remembered 

138 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

in  the  fine  salon  which  bears  his  name  in  the 
palace. 

One  may  spend  many  hours  with  profit  in 
Goethe's  house,  now  restored  as  nearly  as  pos- 
sible to  the  condition  in  which  the  poet  left  it: 
a  fine  house,  notable  chiefly  for  the  range  of  in- 
terests expressed  in  the  collections  of  several 
kinds  which  it  contains,  and  for  the  evidence 
which  it  gives  of  the  mingled  dignity  and  sim- 
plicity of  the  poet's  life — the  first  expressed  in 
spacious  rooms  given  over  to  pictures,  busts,  and 
memorials  of  great  men,  and  the  second  dis- 
closed by  the  extreme  plainness  of  the  working- 
room,  and  the  tiny  chamber  opening  from  it  in 
which  Goethe  died.  It  is  profitable  to  walk 
through  the  palace  and  study  the  elegant  salons 
in  which "  Goethe  and  Schiller  are  commemo- 
rated by  mural  scenes  from  their  works,  and 
then  go  directly  to  the  simple  little  rooms,  not 
far  distant,  in  which  the  two  poets  died;  or  to 
enter  the  grand-ducal  vault  in  the  new  cemetery 
and  note  the  presence  of  wreaths  and  flowers  on 
the  coffins,  not  of  princely  rulers,  but  of  the  two 
poets,  whose  beautiful  friendship  finds  here  its 
final  expression. 

139 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

Best  of  all,  perhaps,  is  it  to  walk  through  the 
winding,  shaded  park,  barely  kept  from  wild- 
ness ;  to  come  in  a  secluded  place  upon  the  coiled 
serpent  in  bronze  which  sj^mbolized  for  Goethe 
the  genius  loci;  to  make  one's  way  slowly  to  the 
garden  house  which  Goethe  loved  so  well,  and 
in  which  he  so  often  sought  solitude  and  silence 
for  his  work,  and  to  sit  in  the  places  which  were 
dear  to  him.  Never,  surely,  did  a  meditative 
spirit  find  more  congenial  surroundings  than 
Goethe  found  in  these  green  and  fragrant 
places  of  peace.  It  is  a  piece  of  special  good 
fortune  to  fall  in,  along  those  walks,  as  did  the 
writer,  with  an  old-time  resident  of  Weimar 
who  has  grown  up  in  its  traditions  and  loves  it 
for  its  poets,  and  to  hear  his  eager,  affectionate 
narrative  of  events  and  story  of  localities;  and 
then  to  go  into  some  secluded  spot  and  ask  one's 
self  what  there  was  in  Goethe's  career  and  ge- 
nius to  justify  the  extraordinary  interest  which 
centers  in  him. 

The  minor  conditions  in  Goethe's  life  were 
unusually  fortunate,  for  the  poet  was  well  born 
in  every  sense;  his  childhood  had  surroundings 
picturesque  to  the  eye  and  full  of  suggestion  to 

140 


o 


JX.\ 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

the  imagination ;  he  had  exceptional  educational 
opportunities,  the  best  and  most  fruitful  of  them 
being  his  mother's  genius  for  story-telling;  he 
had  perfect  health  and  an  impressive  and  win- 
ning personality;  he  never  knew  care  in  the  or- 
dinary sense  of  the  word,  for  he  was  all  his 
life  shielded  from  material  uncertainty  and 
anxiety,  with  work  enough  of  the  methodical 
kind  to  give  him  occupation  and  position,  but 
not  enough  to  diminish  the  energy  of  his  intelli- 
gence or  to  destroy  the  freshness  of  his  spirit. 
He  had  rank,  station,  friends,  fame,  and  long 
life — all  great  and  helpful  aids  to  the  unfolding 
and  maturing  of  a  great  nature  and  the  free  flow 
outward  of  a  great  inward  force.  These  pros- 
perous conditions  were  important,  but  they  were, 
nevertheless,  minor  conditions ;  for  they  did  not 
bear  directly  upon  the  impulse  which  a  creative 
nature  receives  from  rich  material,  from  a  stir- 
ring atmosphere,  and  from  that  searching  ap- 
peal to  the  heart  and  the  imagination  made  by 
a  great  people  silent  but  full  of  spiritual  eager- 
ness and  restless  with  unexpressed  thought  and 
emotion. 

Homer  spoke  to  a  homogeneous  race;  Dante 
143 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

to  a  divided  country,  but  to  an  Italian  nature, 
alert,  energetic,  and  proudly  conscious  of  the 
possession  of  great  qualities;  Shakespeare  to 
an  England  turbulent,  ill-conditioned,  and  un- 
trained in  the  higher  arts,  but  overflowing  with 
unspent  vitality,  with  a  dawning  national  con- 
sciousness full  of  insolence,  but  full  also  of 
splendid  possibilities  of  growth  and  achieve- 
ment. In  Goethe's  youth  there  was  not  only  no 
Germany,  but  there  was,  in  the  deepest  sense  of 
the  phrase,  no  German  people.  There  was  a 
multitude  of  petty  States,  but  there  was  no 
nation;  there  were  Prussians,  Hanoverians, 
Saxons,  Bavarians,  Swabians,  but  there  was, 
for  the  purposes  of  art,  no  German  race.  There 
was  a  country  held  together  by  geographical 
conditions,  but  split  into  fragments  by  political 
boundary  lines;  there  was  a  race  of  common 
origin,  but  broken  asunder  bj^  differences  of 
religion,  of  history,  temperament,  and  ideal; 
there  was  a  language  common  to  a  large  com- 
munity, but  still  to  be  enriched  by  the  loving 
genius  of  great  artists,  who  are  constantly  add- 
ing to  the  resoiH'ces  of  speech  no  less  than  to 
those  of  thought.  There  had  been  true  poets 
in  Germany  centuries  before  Goethe,  and  the 

144 


WEIMAR  AND   GOETHE 

literature  was  rich  in  legend  and  tradition,  in 
epic  and  song,  but  it  is  nevertheless  true  that 
there  had  been  no  great  German  literature. 
Goethe  was  the  contemporary  in  his  old  age  of 
Scott  and  Carlyle,  but  there  was  no  Chaucer, 
Shakespeare,  Spenser,  Milton,  or  Dryden  be- 
hind him;  there  were  in  place  of  these  the  old 
Epic  poets ;  there  were  Hans  Sachs,  Klopstock, 
and  Wieland.  The  significance  of  this  state- 
ment lies  in  the  fact  that,  although  the  German 
language  was  as  old  as  the  English,  it  had  no 
great  poets.  It  is  true  that  Homer  and  Dante 
had  no  great  predecessors,  but  each  stood  at  the 
beginning  of  the  real  history  of  his  race; 
Goethe,  on  the  other  hand,  appeared  at  a  late 
hour  in  that  history,  and  found  the  literature  still 
to  be  created,  and  the  language  still  to  be  modu- 
lated to  the  finer  uses  of  expression.  Youth  was 
past,  both  for  the  race  and  the  people,  but  the 
works  of  youth  were  still  to  be  accomplished 
and  the  fruits  of  youth  were  still  to  be  borne. 

There  were  great  figures  in  Germany  while 
Goethe  was  a  student  at  Leipsic  and  at  Strass- 
burg;  but  Lessing,  Herder,  and  Winckelmann 
were  thinkers  and  critics  of  the  creative  temper 
rather  than  writers  of  the  creative  order  and 

145 


WEIMAR    AND    GOETHE 

quality.  The  names  of  Bodmer  and  Gottsched, 
those  wooden  gods  of  a  Germany  in  artistic  and 
intellectual  tutelage  to  France,  bring  before  the 
mind  by  concrete  illustration  the  aridity  of 
spirit,  the  shallowness  of  insight,  and  the  dead- 
ness  of  thought  which  reigned  in  Germany  in 
the  early  years  of  Goethe's  life.  Xever  has  a 
poet  of  the  first  rank  fallen  upon  times  more 
uninspiring  and  come  to  maturity  among  a  peo- 
ple more  divided.  Both  race  and  language  were 
old,  but  they  lacked  the  trained  intelligence,  the 
solidarity  of  experience,  the  unity  of  emotion 
and  ideal,  which  are  the  finest  fruits  of  maturity. 
From  the  very  start  Goethe  was  driven  back 
upon  himself  and  forced  to  undertake  con- 
sciously and  of  set  purpose  the  work  which,  un- 
der more  inspiring  conditions,  would  have  been 
almost  instinctive.  For  to  speak  simply  and 
naturally,  in  good  German  speech  out  of  a 
sound  German  heart,  was,  at  the  time  "  Gotz  " 
appeared,  to  be  a  reformer  and  to  lead  a  move- 
ment. Not  only  was  the  French  influence  to  be 
destroyed  and  the  French  standards,  methods, 
and  tastes  to  be  driven  out,  but  a  native  taste 
was  to  be  educated,  and  true  racial  forms  of 

146 


The  State  Church  at  Weimar 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

expression  were  to  be  fashioned.  Goethe  was 
too  self -centered,  even  in  his  youth,  and  of  an 
intellectual  fiber  too  vigorous,  to  come  under  the 
spell  of  the  shallow  foreign  influence  so  widely 
prevalent.  The  French  classicism,  which  drew 
its  inspiration,  not  from  the  originative  litera- 
ture of  the  Greeks,  but  from  the  derivative  litera- 
ture of  the  Romans,  had  no  charms  for  a  nature 
so  rich  in  original  instincts  and  so  strongly 
swayed  by  the  free  and  living  forces  of  the  time. 
It  was  to  the  past  of  his  own  people  that  Goethe 
turned  when  he  wrote,  with  a  strong,  vigorous 
hand,  the  virile  and  genuinely  German  drama 
of  "  Gotz  von  Berlichingen  " ;  it  was  the  dis- 
eased and  disordered  fancy  among  his  own  Teu- 
tonic kin  that  he  portrayed  with  such  searching 
insight  and  power  in  the  "  Sorrows  of  AVerther." 
And  the  storm  of  acclamation  which  swept  Ger- 
many showed  how  powerfully  the  chords  of  ra- 
cial feeling  had  been  struck  and  how  clear  was 
Goethe's  insight  into  the  German  nature.  It 
seemed  as  if  a  straight  and  easy  road  to  fame 
and  popularity  lay  before  him ;  for  he  had  onlj^ 
to  hold  to  Germanic  subjects  and  to  the  broad, 
free.  Romantic  manner  to  deepen  and  confirm 

149 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

his  hold  upon  a  people  who,  although  become 
both  prosaic  and  sentimental,  had  not  lost  the 
German  feeling,  and  understood  a  note  struck 
out  of  chords  long  silent,  but  which  had  not 
lost  the  power  of  vibration.  To  Goethe,  how- 
ever, with  his  extraordinary  breadth  of  view, 
and  his  steadily  deepening  insight  into  the  na- 
ture and  functions  of  art,  the  situation  was  not 
so  simple;  it  was,  indeed,  highly  complex.  He 
felt  the  loneliness  of  a  man  superior  in  gift  and 
vision,  not  only  to  his  contemporaries,  but  to  his 
predecessors  in  his  own  field.  Lessing  had 
much  to  teach  him  in  the  way  of  clarification  of 
sight;  Herder  opened  up  life  on  all  sides  by 
those  luminous  glances  of  his  into  the  heart  of 
things;  and  without  the  education  which  he  had 
from  Winckelmann  he  could  never  have  under- 
stood Italy  and  discerned  the  secret  of  antique 
art  as  he  did  in  the  impressionable  years  of 
his  famous  visit.  Nevertheless,  to  a  man  of 
Goethe's  power,  there  was  the  consciousness  of 
creative  possibilities  as  yet  unrealized  in  the 
native  literature,  either  past  or  present.  If  he 
had  been  a  dramatist  by  the  structure  of  his 
mind,    there    would    have    been    successors    to 

150 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

"Gotz"  and  "Egmont";  but  Goethe  was  a 
dramatist  by  intention  rather  than  by  nature. 
He  was  drawn  away,  by  the  immense  range  of 
his  mind,  from  the  definiteness  and  concreteness 
of  the  dramatic  representation  of  life.    He  used 
the  dramatic  form  many  times,  and  with  very 
great  success ;  but,  except  in  the  portrayal  of  two 
or  three  women,  he  does  not  convey  the  impres- 
sion of  being  compelled  to  use  that  form ;  and  in 
this  connection  we  must  recall  his  own  words: 
"  Talent  may  do  what  it  will;  genius  does  what 
it  must."    He  could  not  find  expression  for  the 
ideas  that  thronged  about  in  a  repetition  of  his 
earlier  successes.     When  he  came,  however,  to 
the  question  of  other  and  ampler  forms  of  ex- 
pression, he  was  confronted  by  the  fact  that  he 
must  create  or  introduce  them.     Neither  the 
German  language  nor  the  German  literature 
furnished  them  ready  to  his  hand.    Style  in  the 
true  sense  of  the  word  was  almost  unknown  in 
Germany.     It  was  not  until  the  publication  of 
"  Tasso  "  that  Goethe's  own  style  in  its  distinc- 
tion and  perfection  was  discerned ;  not  until  the 
appearance  of  "  Hermann  und  Dorothea  "  that 
the  rhythmic  possibilities  of  the  German  lan- 

151 


WEIMAR    AND    GOETHE 

guage  were  revealed.  Klopstock,  Hermann 
Grimm  tells  us,  was  the  creator  of  modern  Ger- 
man prosody;  he  wrote  the  first  true  German 
odes,  the  first  real  German  hexameters;  but  he 
became  a  mannerist,  and  he  never  was,  at  any 
period,  a  great  writer.  When  "  Hermann  und 
Dorothea  "  appeared,  Gleim  declared  that  the 
lovely  pastoral  was  a  "sin  against  his  holy 
Voss."  The  famous  translation  of  Homer  was 
a  masterpiece,  indeed,  and  delivered  the  Ger- 
man hexameter  from  its  academic  precision  and 
artificiality,  and  gave  it  the  freedom  and  move- 
ment of  living  speech.  It  was  Goethe,  however, 
who  first  touched  this  verse,  so  readily  made 
sluggish  and  prosaic,  with  complete  ease  and 
skill,  and  made  it  so  completely  at  home  in  Ger- 
man that  it  seems  the  native  form  of  one  of  the 
most  charming  pastorals  in  any  modern  speech. 
All  this  and  much  more  Goethe  had  to  do 
to  free  his  own  mind  and  to  effect  that  enlarge- 
ment of  German  literatin-e  which  la}^  within  his 
power.  "Egmont,"  "  Tasso,"  "  Iphigenia," 
"  Faust,"  were  thronging  about  him  in  the  early 
Weimar  days;  they  filled  his  imagination,  but 
he  seemed  incapable  of  working  them  out.    A 

152 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

richer  atmosphere  was  necessary;  another  stage 
in  his  development  was  inevitable.     Out  of  the 
Germany  of  1786,  with  its  poverty  of  literary 
art  and  its  defective  artistic  instinct,  Goethe 
passed  into  Italy,  and  came  under  the  full  power 
of  that  great  art  to  which  he  had  long  been 
drawn,  and  with  which  he  had  so  much  in  com- 
mon.    Then  came  what  has  so  often  been  re- 
garded as  the  break  with  his  past ;  as  if  the  con- 
tinuity of  a  life  were  to  be  sought  in  its  works 
rather  than  in  itself!    Whether  wisely  or  un- 
wisely  it  is   unnecessary  to  discuss  here,  the 
writer  of  the  romantic  temper  and  methods  be- 
came a  writer  of  classical  temper  and  methods. 
To  "  Gotz  "  and  "  Werther  "  succeeded  "  Iphi- 
genia,"  "  Tasso,"  and  the  "Roman  Elegies"; 
and  to  the  storm  of  applause  which  greeted  the 
earlier  pieces  succeeded  the  silence  of  indiffer- 
ence or  the  murmurs  of  criticism.     Goethe  lost 
his  audience,  and  did  not  completely  regain  it 
until    the    publication    of    the    first    part    of 
"  Faust "  in  1808.    He  had  not  only  discarded 
old  forms  and  employed  new  ones,  but  he  had 
wholly  changed  his  attitude  toward  his  work; 
he  not  only  modeled  that  work  freely  on  classical 

153 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

models,  but  he  attempted  to  detach  himself 
from  it  and  remove  it  as  definitely  from  all  re- 
lation to  his  life  as  the  works  of  Sophocles  were 
freed  from  all  trace  of  connection,  except  the 
inev^itable  local  color  and  individual  touch,  with 
the  dramatist's  personal  experience.  From 
"  Iphigenia,"  "  Tasso,"  the  "  Roman  Elegies," 
and  from  a  number  of  shorter  poems  like  "  The 
Bride  of  Corinth "  and  "  Alexis  und  Dora," 
Goethe  endeavored  to  detach  himself  entirely 
and  to  give  his  work  an  objectivity  as  definite 
and  complete  as  that  of  a  Greek  statue.  He  did 
not  succeed,  because  his  works  are  one  and  all 
rooted  in  his  experience,  and  because  the  effort 
was  out  of  date ;  no  modern  man  can  do  perfectly 
what  Goethe  attempted  to  do.  "Iphigenia"  is  a 
very  noble  work,  but  when  we  search  for  the  es- 
sential Goethe  we  do  not  look  into  "  Iphigenia  " 
or  "Tasso";  we  look  into  the  first  j)aii;  of 
"  Faust  " — the  "  Faust  "  of  the  Romantic,  not 
the  "  Faust "  of  the  classical,  period.  Thus 
there  appears  in  the  maturity  of  Goethe's  years 
and  genius  a  transformation  which  was  re- 
garded at  the  time  and  is  now  regarded  by  many 
as  a  complete  revolution  in  his  aims  and  meth- 

154 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

ods,  indeed  in  his  very  nature;  for  it  was  not 
until  his  return  to  Weimar,  after  the  two  mo- 
mentous years  in  Italy,  that  the  charge  of  cold- 
ness began  to  be  heard. 

From  any  point  of  view,  the  change  is  strik- 
ing and  of  far-reaching  influence,  and  could 
have  been  possible  only  in  a  man  to  whom  his 
own  country  and  time  did  not  furnish  all  the 
means  of  expression  he  craved,  and  who  was  in 
the  habit  of  a  constant  and  connected  meditation 
on  his  art  and  his  life.  A  man  of  Goethe's 
years,  intelligence,  and  self-command  does  not 
sever  himself  from  his  artistic  past,  break  with 
his  audience,  and  essay  entirely  new  methods  of 
creation  without  deep  and  prolonged  thought. 
Goethe's  conversion  was  rapidly  accomplished 
in  the  genial  Italian  air,  but  it  had  been  long 
in  preparation.  It  is  probable  that  no  great 
writer  ever  searched  his  own  nature  more  rigor- 
ously or  reflected  on  the  conditions  and  func- 
tions of  art  more  exhaustively  than  Goethe  did 
before  and  after  the  Italian  visit.  Every  step 
away  from  the  earlier  standpoint  was  taken  with 
deliberate  intention  and  after  maturest  thought. 
The  change  was  the  product  of  a  philosophy  of 

157 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

art  completely  formulated  in  the  poet's  mind. 
For  it  is  clear  that  Goethe  was  drawn  away 
from  the  Gothic  spirit  and  the  Romantic  man- 
ner, not  by  the  charm  which  attaches  to  the  clas- 
sical form,  but  by  that  spell  which  resides  in  the 
antique  view  of  life  and  of  art  as  its  intimate 
and  natural  expression.  Goethe  was  primarily 
an  artist,  with  a  lyrical  note  as  clear,  personal, 
and  beguiling  as  any  in  literature;  art  was  to 
him  the  one  form  which  life  took  on  that  gave 
it  harmony,  unity,  and  coherence ;  and  he  found 
in  the  antique  ideals  and  atmosphere  the  condi- 
tions which  made  art,  not  sporadic  and  indi- 
vidual, but  the  constant  and  glorious  witness  of 
the  beauty  at  the  heart  of  all  things.  If  he  was 
mistaken,  there  was  a  noble  element  in  his  error ; 
it  was  the  mistake  of  an  Olympian  born  in  an 
age  of  Titanic  unrest  and  struggle. 

In  Goethe's  nature,  moreover,  the  spontane- 
ous element  was  alwaj^s  held  in  check  or  di- 
rected by  the  rationalizing  element.  The  flow- 
ers of  song  often  bloomed  very  rapidlj'^  under 
his  hand,  but  in  such  cases  there  was  always  an 
antecedent  preparation  of  the  soil;  the  seeds 
were  already  germinating,  and  the  urgence  of 

158 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

some  deeply  felt  experience  or  the  genial 
warmth  of  some  prosperous  hour  or  event 
swiftly  brought  the  blade  to  the  light.  He 
often  wrote  with  great  rapidity,  but  there  was 
nothing  in  common  between  his  methods  and 
the  methods  of  the  great  improvisers  like  Byron 
and  Lope  de  Vega.  The  germinal  idea  of 
"  Faust,"  he  tells  us,  was  suddenly  unfolded  to 
his  imagination;  but  he  spent  sixty  years  in 
working  it  out!  "  The  truth  is,"  wrote  Lowell 
to  Mr.  Fields,  "  my  brain  requires  a  long  brood- 
ing-time before  it  can  hatch  anything.  As  soon 
as  the  life  comes  into  the  thing,  it  is  quick 
enough  in  chipping  the  shell."  With  Goethe 
the  process  was  not  so  much  brooding  over  his 
theme  as  looking  at  it  from  many  sides  and  put- 
ting it  into  different  forms.  During  the  first 
Weimar  period,  from  1776  to  1786,  while  he  was 
so  silent  and  apparently  so  absorbed  in  pleas- 
ures and  administration,  "  Tasso,"  "  Iphigenia," 
"  Egmont,"  "  WiUielm  Meister,"  and  "  Faust  " 
possessed  his  imagination  by  turns.  Thej^  had 
lodged  there  in  those  first  prodigal  years  of  his 
youth  at  Frankfort.  He  not  only  nourished 
and  matured  them  by  brooding  meditation,  but 

159 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

he  gave  them  shape  and  form.  While  "  Faust  " 
and  "  Wilhehn  Meister "  received  occasional 
touches,  "  Tasso,"  "  Iphigenia,"  and  "  Eg- 
mont "  were  written  out  in  forms  which  were 
afterward  very  largely  or  wholly  discarded. 
So  far  as  "  Faust  "  was  concerned,  it  was  a  kind 
of  running  commentary  begun  when  the  poet 
was  a  student  and  completed  in  his  eighty-sec- 
ond year!  Evidently,  here  was  a  singer  whose 
gifts  were  from  heaven,  but  whose  methods  of 
work  were  as  deliberately  thought  out  and  his 
processes  of  creation  as  consciously  ordered  as 
if  he  had  been  a  child  of  Mercury  rather  than 
of  the  Muses.  In  studying  Goethe's  genius 
one  is  constantly  reminded  of  the  free,  sponta- 
neous, and  buoyant  temper  of  his  mother;  in 
studying  his  methods  one  is  reminded  of  his 
precise,  orderly,  and  prosaic  father. 

There  was  a  distinct  vein  of  philosophic  in- 
quiry running  through  Goethe's  intellectual 
life,  and  there  was  a  strong  critical  tendency 
in  his  nature.  He  was  never  an  orderly  thinker, 
but  he  was  always  striving  to  arrive  at  the  unity 
of  things,  and  to  discover  those  central  points 
at  which  the  arts  and  sciences  disclosed  the  iden- 

160 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

tity  of  their  laws  and  the  harmony  of  their  meth- 
ods. He  studied  both  Spinoza  and  Kant,  not 
exhaustively,  but  intelligently;  and  while  he 
resolutely  confined  his  speculations  within  the 
horizons  of  time  and  space,  he  habitually  con- 
cerned himself  with  the  deeper  relations  of 
things,  and  especially  with  their  relations  of 
interdependence.  He  cared  little  for  phenom- 
ena in  themselves,  although  his  attachment  to 
the  concrete  in  nature  was  so  intense  as  seriouslj' 
to  impair  the  value  of  his  methods  of  observa- 
tion; but  he  cared  greatly  for  phenomena  as 
they  hinted  at  that  interior  unity  which  made 
them  all  manifestations  of  one  force.  His  dis- 
covery of  the  intermaxillary  bone  and  of  the 
typical  plant  disclose  the  bent  of  his  mind  to- 
ward a  comprehension  of  nature  as  a  living 
whole.  In  spite  of  the  large  place  which  gener- 
alization holds  in  his  work,  Goethe  was  a  poet 
with  a  philosophic  bent  rather  than  a  philosopher 
with  a  poetic  temper.  In  his  old  age  the  didac- 
tic mood  predominated  over  the  purely  artistic, 
but  even  in  the  "  Elective  Affinities  "  there  are 
passages  of  passionate  intensity  and  power. 
The  critical  faculty,  when  it  deals  mainly 
163 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

with  principles,  as  in  Goethe's  case,  contains  a 
distinct  philosophical  element;  but  its  chief 
characteristic  is  its  power  to  discern  artistic 
values  and  to  judge  artistic  processes.  It 
is  allied,  therefore,  with  the  creative  rather 
than  with  the  purely  philosophic  mind.  Goethe 
is,  on  the  whole,  the  greatest  of  literary  crit- 
ics; indeed,  his  criticism  has  such  insight  and 
range  that  he  may  be  called  the  greatest  of 
art  critics.  No  man  has  said  so  many  and 
such  luminous  things  about  the  artist  and  the 
creative  mind  and  mood.  A  complete  phi- 
losophy of  art,  in  the  widest  sense  of  a  much- 
abused  word,  lies  in  his  work;  a  philosophy  not 
like  that  of  Hegel,  worked  out  from  the  his- 
torical standpoint,  and  with  constant  reference 
to  its  relations  with  the  Absolute;  nor  like  that 
of  Taine,  elaborated  from  the  psycho-physio- 
logical point  of  view;  but  slowly  distilled  from 
a  prolonged  artistic  activity,  and  from  first- 
hand acquaintance  with  the  artistic  nature.  In 
this  field,  as  in  others,  Goethe  is  fragmentary 
and  defective  in  logical  arrangement;  because 
his  conclusions  were  reached,  not  as  steps  in  a 
formal  process  of  thought,  but  as  generaliza- 

164 


WEIMAR    AXD    GOETHE 

tions  from  a  growing  experience.  He  does  not 
discuss  art  with  speculative  interest;  he  speaks 
as  one  having  authority,  because  he  discerns 
the  vital  processes  and  relations  of  artistic  pro- 
duction to  the  artist  and  to  life.  He  values 
technical  skill,  and  knows  the  secrets  of  crafts- 
manship; but  he  is  concerned  constantly  with 
art  in  its  fundamental  relations  with  civilization 
and  with  individual  experience,  and  he  is  in 
constant  contact  with  the  sources  of  its  power 
and  freshness.  The  distinctly  judicial  activity 
of  the  critical  faculty  is,  nevertheless,  always 
going  on  in  him,  and  constantly  betrays  its  pres- 
ence. So  clearly,  indeed,  does  he  recognize  the 
influence  of  the  critical  spirit  in  his  own  life, 
that  he  has  more  than  once  given  it  objective 
form,  and  Mephistopheles  remains  the  great- 
est literary  representative  of  the  critical  spirit 
divorced  from  the  creative  spirit  and  become, 
therefore,  entirely  negative  and  destructive. 

There  is  still  another  characteristic  of  Goethe 
which  must  be  emphasized  in  connection  with 
the  rationalizing  side  of  his  nature,  and  that  is 
the  extraordinary  intimacj^  of  connection  be- 
tween his  works  and  his  experience.     All  the 

165 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

greater  works  of  Goethe,  even  those  which,  hke 
"  Iphigenia  "  and  "  Tasso,"  seem  most  detached 
from  him,  were  bound  up  with  experiences 
through  which  he  had  passed,  or  with  persons 
whom  he  had  known.  The  impression,  more 
than  once  spread  abroad,  that  he  sought  the 
deeper  relations  and  the  more  intimate  happen- 
ings of  life  for  the  sake  of  the  literary  material 
they  supplied,  is  without  foundation;  it  is,  in- 
deed, a  misrepresentation  of  a  man  who,  what- 
ever his  faults,  had  a  notable  kindliness  of  spirit. 
If  any  criticism  is  to  be  made  upon  Goethe  in 
this  connection,  it  finds  its  justification  rather 
in  his  studious  avoidance  of  agitating  experi- 
ences and  disturbing  relationships;  so  far  was 
he  from  seeking  subjects  for  the  kind  of  vivi- 
section which  has  sometimes  been  charged 
against  him.  Nor  is  there  a  trace  of  artistic  in- 
difference to  individual  suffering  in  his  dealing 
with  those  relationships  of  his  past  in  which 
others  were  concerned.  What  could  be  more 
delicately  or  tenderly  recorded  than  the  idyllif 
romance  of  his  student  days  at  Strassburg  which 
has  immortalized  Frederika?  When  this  lovely 
vision  rose  before  his  imagination  years  after- 

166 


The  Garden  of  Goethe's  House 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

ward,  his  secretary  noted  the  agitation  of  the 
old  man  and  the  deep  silence  into  which  he  fell. 
The  disclosure  of  Goethe's  experience  in  his 
work  has  nothing  in  common  with  the  vulgar 
invasion  of  the  sanctities  of  friendship  and  love 
of  which  he  has  sometimes  been  accused.  There 
is  no  record  of  any  light  or  purely  professional 
use  of  burned-out  passions  for  the  purposes  of 
art.  Goethe  rationalized  his  experience  and 
gave  it  artistic  expression  from  an  inward  and 
irresistible  impulse ;  it  was  the  law  of  his  nature, 
and  its  necessity  as  well,  to  meditate  upon  every- 
thing he  had  passed  through,  and  to  discern  in 
it  whatever  was  beautiful  and  permanent.  No 
man  ever  kept  a  more  complete  record  of  his 
inward  life,  and  outward  events  found  place  in 
that  record  because  they  influenced  and  affected 
his  development.  The  calmness  of  his  bearing 
in  later  years — and  it  is  worth  remembering 
that  it  is  the  old  Goethe  and  not  the  nature  or 
young  Goethe  whom  the  world  recalls  most 
vividly — cannot  hide  the  tumults  and  agitations 
through  which  he  passed,  and  his  imagination 
kept  long  in  painful  touch  with  experiences 
which  most  men  would  have  forgotten.     He 

169 


WEIMAR    AND    GOETHE 

could  rid  himself  of  these  haunting  memories 
only  by  writing  them  out;  when  he  had  given 
them  objective  expression,  they  seemed  to  de- 
tach themselves  from  him.  He  did  not  seek  ad- 
ventures of  the  heart  and  the  soul;  nor  did  he 
go  about  beating  the  bush  for  the  poetic  idea. 
He  was  as  far  as  possible  removed  from  the  cold, 
impassive  nature  turning  every  emotion  to  ac- 
count and  following  rigidly  and  haughtily  a 
plan  of  artistic  activity  through  a  long  and  sed- 
ulously guarded  life.  This  is,  or  has  been,  the 
popular  ideal  of  Goethe.  It  could  not  have  been 
further  from  the  truth  if  it  had  been  the  popular 
ideal  of  Schiller — that  eager,  restless,  aspiring 
spirit  whose  life  went  out  in  one  great  breath 
of  aspiration  and  work. 

What  strikes  one  who  reads  the  life  of  Goethe 
with  insight  is  his  capacity  for  suifering  and 
his  dependence  on  experience.  He  had,  as  an 
older  man,  a  stiff  manner  inherited  from  his 
father,  and  he  cultivated  persistently  calmness 
and  repose  of  spirit  because  lie  regarded  these 
qualities  as  conducive  to  the  ripening  of  a  man's 
nature,  but  he  was  terribly  shaken  by  the  sor- 
rows which  from  time  to  time  knocked  at  the 

170 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

doors  of  his  strong  house.  As  for  his  artistic 
prevision,  no  great  writer  was  ever  more  de- 
pendent for  his  material  upon  what  life  brought 
him.  He  did  not  forecast  his  creative  activities 
and  give  them  studied  direction ;  he  waited  upon 
life,  and  he  was  powerless  to  create  until  life, 
speaking  through  experience,  gave  him  some- 
thing to  say  and  the  impulse  to  say  it.  The  work 
of  no  other  poet  reveals  a  relation  so  close  and 
constant  with  the  happenings,  events,  and  in- 
ward activities  of  his  own  history.  Beginning 
with  the  "  Sorrows  of  Werther,"  it  is  possible 
to  connect  almost  every  character  in  Goethe's 
books  with  himself  or  with  some  one  whom  he 
had  known;  every  incident  with  some  episode 
in  his  own  story  or  the  story  of  his  friends ;  al- 
most every  experience  described  or  illustrated 
with  some  actual  experience  accessible  to  him. 
The  history  of  his  loves,  his  friendships,  his  jour- 
neys, his  studies,  lies  beyond  the  touch  of  time 
in  the  long  record  of  his  dramas,  poems,  novels, 
autobiography.  His  works  taken  as  a  whole 
constitute,  as  he  himself  declared,  one  great  con- 
fession. Nothing  is  concealed  and  very  little 
is  extenuated.    The  truth  comes  out  from  begin- 

171 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

ning  to  end,  and  the  man's  limitations  are  as 
evident  as  his  strength.  These  works  fit  his 
vital  history  like  a  robe  woven  of  the  substance 
of  that  which  it  clothes.  Ideas  came  to  him  by 
the  way  of  the  heart  rather  than  of  the  head; 
and  they  did  not  come  until  he  was  ripe  for 
them.  With  all  his  gifts,  he  could  not  have 
projected  into  thin  air  those  vast  and  irides- 
cent dreams  of  Shelley;  he  had  to  keep  in  con- 
stant touch  with  reality.  When  he  pushed  sym- 
bolism beyond  the  limits  of  his  own  personal 
contact  with  life,  as  he  did  in  the  second  part 
of  "  Faust,"  he  did  not  cease  to  be  interesting, 
but  he  did  cease  to  be  inspired.  Among  all  his 
beautiful  lyrics,  unsurpassed  in  their  sponta- 
neity and  freshness  of  feeling  and  their  winged 
melody,  there  is  barely  one  which  is  not  known 
to  have  risen  out  of  some  deep  emotion.  In 
works  of  apparently  impersonal  character  he 
often  speaks  most  directly  out  of  his  heart.  In 
"  Tasso "  he  invests  Ferrara  with  surpassing 
charm,  but  he  is  thinking  of  Weimar.  Every 
poem  and  play  is  a  chapter  in  his  biography. 
He  did  not  seek  the  materials  for  artistic  activ- 
ity ;  they  sought  him.    He  did  not  live  for  art ; 

172 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

he  lived  in  and  through  art.  Art  was  his  natural 
form  of  expression,  and  expression  was  the  ne- 
cessity of  his  nature,  as  it  is  of  all  rich  and 
healthy  natures.  Through  this  long-sustained 
expression  there  ran  a  vein  of  fresh,  spon- 
taneous thought  and  feeling;  but  so  great  and 
rich  a  harvest  could  not  have  been  reaped  save 
by  a  deep  reflection  upon  the  significance  of 
these  outward  happenings.  Goethe  realized  his 
experience  and  made  it  clear  and  intelligible 
by  meditation. 

It  will  be  seen,  therefore,  that  the  poet's 
method  of  production  emphasized  the  rational- 
izing tendencies  in  his  nature  which  have  been 
indicated,  and  that  the  times  upon  which  he  was 
cast,  the  natural  bent  of  his  mind,  his  strong 
critical  instinct,  and  the  dependence  of  his  ac- 
tivity upon  his  experience,  developed  and  deep- 
ened his  rationalizing  faculty.  The  crowning 
evidence  of  the  influence  of  the  rationalizing 
faculty  upon  his  inward  life  and  upon  his  ar- 
tistic activity  is  to  be  found  in  the  definiteness 
of  his  aims  and  methods.  From  a  compara- 
tively early  period  he  had  determined  to  make 
the  most  of  life  by  intelligent  regulation  of  his 

173 


WEIMAR   AXD    GOETHE 

habits,  occupations,  and  gifts  in  the  interest  of 
complete  self -development.  INIost  men  take 
what  opportunity  oifers  them  and  wait  on 
events  without  understanding  them.  Goethe 
resolved  to  convert  all  experience  into  one  great 
opportunit}^  "  From  my  boyhood,"  says  Wil- 
helm  Meister,  "  it  has  been  my  wish  and  purpose 
to  develop  completely  all  that  is  in  me,  ...  to 
make  my  own  existence  harmonious."  In  other 
words,  Goethe  made  a  deliberate  plan  to  live  his 
life  in  his  own  way  and  for  certain  definite  ends. 
"  The  desire  to  rear  as  high  as  possible  in  the 
air  the  pja'amid  of  my  existence,  of  which  the 
base  is  given  and  placed  for  me,  predominates 
over  every  other,  and  scarcely  allows  itself  for  a 
moment  to  be  forgotten."  These  words,  spoken 
by  a  man  under  thirty,  were  still  descriptive 
of  the  same  man  when,  at  eighty-three,  death 
came  to  interrupt  for  the  first  time  habits  of 
work  and  of  thought  resolutely  pursued  for  a 
full  half -century.  Whatever  judgment  we  may 
form  concerning  this  plan  of  life,  it  is  certainly 
true  that  it  was  a  plan  as  deliberately  thought 
out  and  as  resolutely  worked  out  as  any  of  those 
practical  experiments  in  life  by  which  some  of 

174 


> 


WEIMAR   AND    GOETHE 

the  most  sincere  Greek  thinkers  evidenced  their 
faith  in  the  reality  of  philosophy. 

From  many  points  of  view,  therefore,  the 
nature  and  mind  of  Goethe  disclose  the  philo- 
sophical as  distinctly  as  the  creative  faculty,  the 
critical  as  well  as  the  artistic  temper,  and  the  ra- 
tionalizing no  less  than  the  spontaneous  impulse. 
In  this  union  of  qualities  always  dissimilar  and 
sometimes  antagonistic  is  found  the  difficulty 
of  clearly  understanding  and  wisely  judging 
this  many-sided  man;  in  this  unusual  combina- 
tion is  discoverable  that  element  in  his  work 
which  has  made  him  one  of  the  greatest  teachers 
of  all  time  and  one  of  the  foremost  intellectual 
forces  of  modern  times;  and  in  this  same  com- 
bination is  to  be  found  the  secret  of  his  occa- 
sional artistic  weakness — a  weakness  upon 
which  Wordsworth  put  his  hand  when  he  said 
that  Goethe's  work  is  not  inevitable  enough. 
Calculation  and  intention  are  sometimes  in  the 
ascendant,  as  in  the  second  part  of  "Faust";  and 
the  spontaneous  flow  of  imagination  is  neither 
swift  nor  deep  enough  to  drain  into  one  current 
the  multitudinous  streams  which  rise  over  so  vast 
a  territory  of  knowledge  and  thought. 

177 


WEIMAR   AXD    GOETHE 

This  rationalizing  element  runs  through  all 
Goethe's  work,  and  gives  it  a  structure  of 
thought  of  singular  massiveness  and  strength. 
There  is  the  closest  relation  between  his  work 
and  his  view  or  philosophy  of  life.  His  artistic 
impulse,  in  all  his  larger  work,  moved  in  entire 
harmony  with,  and  often  under  the  direction  of, 
his  rationalizing  faculty.  He  is  distinctively 
the  teacher  among  creative  writers ;  the  man  who 
aims  not  merely  at  the  free  expression  of  his 
own  nature  and  the  creation  of  beautiful  literary 
forms,  but  also  at  definite  exposition,  through 
the  medium  of  art,  of  certain  general  views. 
This  could  hardly  have  been  otherwise  in  one 
who  held  so  serious  a  view  of  art,  and  to  whom 
it  was  of  such  supreme  importance  as  the  final 
expression  of  the  mind  and  heart  of  man.  For 
with  Goethe,  as  with  all  the  greater  artists,  life 
is  primar}^  and  art  secondary  in  the  order  of 
time ;  but  both  are  parts  of  one  complete  expres- 
sion of  the  soul.  In  Goethe's  case,  however,  this 
process  of  thought  is  more  definitely  marked 
than  in  the  case  of  any  of  his  peers ;  and  it  was 
probably  more  self-conscious  and  self -directed. 


178 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 


HE  artistic  value  of  back- 
grounds is  strikingly  shown 
in  Mr.  Blackmore's  one 
successful  novel,  "  Lorna 
Doone."  There  are  other 
stories  of  his  which  are  not 
without  charming  qualities, 
but  on  this  romance  alone  has  he  put  the  stamp 
of  beauty  and  individuality.  *'  Lorna  Doone  " 
cannot  be  regarded  as  a  great  story ;  it  is,  rather, 
a  lovable  story — one  of  those  pieces  of  art  that 
live  by  reason  of  their  close  touch  upon  the  most 
intimate  and  tender  of  human  relations ;  a  story 
which,  upon  analysis,  reveals  serious  faults  of 
consti-uction  and  defects  of  style,  but  which  no- 
body is  willing  to  analyze.     It  is  too  long;  it 

183 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

drags  in  places ;  the  manner,  under  the  guise  of 
great  simplicity,  is  sometimes  artificial;  and  yet 
it  captivates,  and  its  charm  is  likely  to  abide. 

That  charm  resides  in  two  elements — its 
idyllic  love  story,  and  its  impressive  back- 
ground. If  the  drama  of  John  Ridd  and 
Lorna  Doone  had  been  played  on  a  common- 
place stage,  it  could  hardly  have  appealed  with 
such  beguiling  force  to  the  imagination;  it  is 
because  through  it,  as  through  an  open  window, 
we  are  always  looking  out  on  the  wild,  romantic 
Valley  of  the  Doones  that  it  lives  in  memory 
and  recalls  us  to  many  a  quiet  re-reading.  To 
a  Devonshire  man,  as  Blackmore  reports  with 
evident  satisfaction,  "  Lorna  Doone  "  is  "  as 
good  as  clotted  cream,"  that  delicious  product 
of  the  dairies  of  Devon.  It  is  redolent  of 
Devon  and  Somerset,  two  counties  which  in  va- 
riety and  richness  of  scenery  must  be  ranked 
among  the  first  in  England.  John  Ridd  be- 
longed to  both  counties,  and  both  have  given  the 
story  the  charm  of  landscapes  of  noble  breadth 
and  ripest  beauty. 

There  is  no  better  approach  to  the  Valley  of 
the  Doones  than  a  drive  across  country  from 

184 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

Bideford.  At  nightfall,  in  that  quaint  old 
town,  one  may  look  across  the  Torridge  and  see 
the  lights  shining  from  the  low  windows  of 
"  The  Ship  Tavern,"  where  Salvation  Yeo  and 
his  fellows  once  talked  far  into  the  night  of  the 
perils  of  the  Spanish  Main.  One  may,  if  he 
chooses,  sit  in  the  room  in  which  much  of  the 
work  of  preparation  for  the  writing  of  "  West- 
ward Ho  "  was  done.  On  a  soft  summer  morn- 
ing, the  low  sky  veiled  with  a  pale  mist,  no  road 
could  be  more  beguiling  than  that  which  takes 
one  from  the  old  seaport,  where  famous  sailors 
were  bred  in  the  sixteenth  century,  into  the 
heart  of  the  lovely  Devonshire  landscape,  with 
its  bold  lines  of  hills,  its  rich  verdure,  its  fields 
ripe  with  the  deep-rooted  loveliness  of  ancient 
f ertihty,  its  hedges  so  high  that  one  is  often  shut 
in  between  impenetrable  walls  of  hawthorn  and 
privet. 

For  hours  through  this  quiet  world  of  old- 
time  beauty  one  drives  in  absolute  solitude;  not 
even  a  cart  comes  down  the  long  hills  or  around 
the  winding  curves  of  the  road.  Later,  as  one 
nears  Lynton,  coaches  will  thunder  past;  but 
across  country  this  western  corner  of  England 

185 


THE  LAND  OF  LORXA  DOONE 

is  as  quiet  as  it  was  in  the  days  before  tele- 
phones vexed  the  ear  with  the  noise  of  distant 
cities.  In  some  corner  of  a  field  or  some  bend 
in  the  road,  under  immemorial  oaks  or  beeches, 
there  is  fitting  time  for  luncheon  and  a  quiet 
nooning  for  the  horses.  If  there  happens  to  be 
a  long  hill  ahead,  one  walks  on  in  advance,  stop- 
ping now  and  again  to  enter  some  newly  har- 
vested field  and  catch  another  glimpse  of  the 
fertile  landscape  where  long  service  of  human 
needs  has  bred  a  deep  sense  of  fellowship  be- 
tween man  and  meadow.  In  one  of  these  little 
incursions  one  may  meet  a  typical  English 
farmer,  taking  time  for  a  turn  with  his  pipe  and 
predisposed  to  friendly  talk,  with  a  vein  of 
characteristic  criticism  of  the  Government,  the 
state  of  agriculture,  and  the  English  system  in 
general;  for  farmers  are  much  the  same  the 
world  over,  and  are  rarely  without  good-hu- 
mored grievances  against  existing  conditions. 

At  the  end  of  the  afternoon  the  landscape 
changes,  and  one  comes  out  upon  Exmoor,  with 
its  broad  expanse  of  gently  sloping  moor, 
brown  or  green,  with  touches  of  purple  bell- 
heather.    The  noble  coast  lies  but  a  mile  or  two 

186 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

beyond ;  and  there  again  the  landscape  changes, 
and  the  cliffs  of  Devon  stand  in  the  sea,  rocky 
and  castellated  or  green  to  the  very  edges  where 
the  tides  rise  and  fall. 

It  is  a  noble  approach  which  one  makes  who 
goes  to  the  Valley  of  the  Doones  from  Lynton ; 
at  once  wild,  solitary,  and  beautiful  with  the 
loveliness  of  color,  of  moving  streams,  and  of 
bold  hillsides.  There  are  passes  between  the 
hills  so  deep  and  densely  overhung  with  trees 
that  it  is  easy  to  imagine  the  sudden  descent  of 
the  robber  band  from  the  hills,  the  brief  strug- 
gle, and  the  swift  success  of  the  adventure. 
Below  the  road  runs  the  stream  which  is  fed  by 
the  two  brooks  which  flow  together  at  Waters- 
meet.  The  meeting  of  these  mountain  brooks 
is  a  place  of  rare  beauty,  where  Bryant  would 
have  found  the  charm  of  solitude  which  laid  its 
spell  upon  him  in  Flora's  Glen  among  the 
Berkshires,  with  an  added  wildness  of  hill  and 
an  added  loveliness  of  ancient  water  flowing 
through  moss-grown  beds.  There  is  a  choice  of 
roads,  and  the  well-informed  go  in  by  one  route 
and  return  by  another.  The  road  through  the 
valley  of  the  Brendon  runs  through  the  quaint 

187 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

hamlet  which  bears  the  name  of  the  stream;  the 
little  villages  are  much  alike:  a  church,  a  par- 
sonage, a  few  laborers'  houses,  a  small  inn,  and 
sometimes  a  picturesque  house  of  size,  solidity, 
and  an  air  of  assured  position. 

The  little  hamlet  of  Oare  is  one  of  the  focal 
points  in  the  story,  and  there  still  stands  the  old 
church  in  which  Lorna  and  John  were  married, 
where  the  true-hearted  girl  fell  into  the  arms  of 
the  faithful  lover,  and  from  which  John  rushed 
in  a  mad  passion  and  heartbreak  to  settle  the 
long  score  with  Carver  Doone.  It  is  a  tiny 
building,  well  hidden  by  trees,  with  a  low 
square  tower,  a  nave  so  small  that  it  seems  like 
a  toy  structure,  and  a  chancel  as  tiny;  one  of 
those  quaint  little  churches  which  one  finds  in 
England,  with  room  for  but  a  handful  of  peo- 
ple, but  touched  with  old  associations  and  giv- 
ing a  quiet  landscape  a  hint  of  ancient  worship 
and  half -forgotten  history.  In  this  church  John 
Ridd  held  office  as  warden  with  a  deep  sense 
of  his  unfitness. 

The  Plover's  Barrows  Farm  of  John  Ridd's 
time  has  vanished,  but  its  site  is  pointed  out,  and 
one  needs  no  imagination  to  look  upon  the  land- 

188 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

scape  through  his  eyes:  "  Ahnost  everybody 
knows,  in  our  part  of  the  world  at  least,  how 
pleasant  and  soft  the  fall  of  the  land  is  round 
Plover's  Barrows  Farm.  Above  it  is  strong- 
dark  mountains,  spread  with  heath,  and  deso- 
late, but  near  our  house  the  valleys  cove,  and 
open  warmth  and  shelter.  Here  are  trees,  and 
bright  green  grass,  and  orchards  full  of  con- 
tentment, and  a  man  scarce  espy  the  brook,  al- 
though he  hears  it  everywhere,  and,  indeed,  a 
stout  good  piece  of  it  comes  through  our  farm- 
yard, and  swells  sometimes  to  a  rush  of  waves, 
when  the  clouds  are  on  the  hilltops.  But  all 
below,  where  the  valley  bends,  and  the  Lyn 
stream  goes  along  with  it,  pretty  meadows  slope 
their  breast,  and  the  sun  spreads  on  the  water." 
Here  lived  the  Ridds — slow-witted,  big-framed, 
honest-hearted  farmer  folk;  loving  the  soil 
which  they  had  worked  for  generations;  clean- 
handed. God-fearing  men  and  women  of  the 
stock  which  has  given  England  an  immovable 
foundation. 

The  Bagsworthy  Valley  lies  a  mile  or  more 
beyond,  and  here,  at  Bagsworthy  Farm,  one 
leaves  the  road  and  follows  a  footpath  along  the 

189 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOOXE 

stream  for  three  miles,  through  the  haunts  and 
home  of  the  Doones.  It  is  a  beautiful  glen, 
with  a  certain  wildness  and  brooding  desolation 
quite  in  keeping  with  its  associations;  but  it  is 
less  bold  and  its  sides  are  less  precipitous  than 
the  descriptions  in  "  Lorna  Doone  "  suggest. 
The  hillsides  are  steep  and  barren  save  for  the 
bell-heather  which  softens  their  outlines,  and 
the  narrow  valley  has  an  atmosphere  of  remote- 
ness and  desolation.  The  waterslide,  when  it  is 
reached,  seems  much  less  alarming  than  it  ap- 
peared to  John  Ridd  when  he  made  his  perilous 
ascent;  and  the  Doone  Gate  is  a  rocky  mound 
which  is  easily  accessible. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  John  Ridd's 
imagination  was  filled  for  years  with  an  almost 
superstitious  dread  of  the  Doones,  whose  reck- 
lessness, audacity,  quick  intelligence,  and  long 
defiance  of  law  had  deeply  impressed  the  whole 
countryside  with  a  sense  of  terror,  so  that  the 
Doone  Valley  became  an  accursed  place,  full 
of  all  manner  of  known  or  unimaginable  ter- 
rors. Moreover,  it  is  more  than  two  centuries 
since  the  spell  of  the  Doones  was  broken  and 
their  nest  burned  over  their  heads,  and  every 

190 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

year  in  that  long  period  has  softened  and  sub- 
dued their  old  haunt.  The  Exmoor  of  to-day 
is  a  very  different  landscape  from  that  upon 
which  men  looked  in  the  time  when  Judge  Jef- 
freys was  holding  the  "  bloody  assizes."  A  cen- 
tury later  Exmoor  was  "  a  land  of  freedom 
and  solitude,  haunt  of  the  bittern  and  red  deer, 
intersected  by  many  a  silent  tomb  and  brawling 
river."  The  red  deer  are  still  there,  and  the 
wild,  lonely  beauty  of  the  heaths  and  of  the 
Valley  of  the  Doones  is  untouched ;  but  INIother 
iNIelldrum  no  longer  hides  in  the  Vallej"  of  the 
Rocks,  the  old  superstitions  have  become  pleas- 
ant legends  for  the  entertainment  of  tourists, 
the  Doones  have  ceased  to  be  terrible  and  be- 
come romantic,  and  their  valley  has  exchanged 
its  inaccessible  savagery  for  a  wild  loveliness 
which  is  somewhat  secluded  but  quite  within 
reach  of  the  pedestrian.  In  the  novel  we  see 
through  John  Ridd's  eyes;  and,  honest  and  lit- 
eral as  the  slow-thinking  but  stout-hearted  lover 
of  Lorna  was,  his  imagination  was  not  un- 
touched by  the  wild  tales  and  superstitious  fears 
of  his  time. 

Coming  out  of  this  lonely  valley,  with  its 
191 


THE  LAND  OF  LORNA  DOONE 

tragic  legend  of  ancient  wrong  rudely  avenged, 
and  its  tender  story  of  old-time  love  transmuted 
into  lifelong  happiness,  one  is  prepared  for  the 
noble  drive  across  the  summits  of  the  hills,  splen- 
did beyond  words  with  the  purple  of  the  bell- 
heather,  mile  upon  mile  of  unbroken  color 
against  the  sky,  with  long  contrasts  of  yellow 
gorse;  the  great  cliffs  green  or  bare  to  the 
water,  and  the  sea  softly  blue  in  the  long  sum- 
mer twilight ;  a  noble  country,  molded  on  large 
lines,  with  a  richness  of  verdure  which  has  its 
roots  in  unnumbered  centuries;  lonely  heaths, 
great  hills  shouldering  one  another  to  the  line 
of  the  sky,  and  a  valley  sacred  to  the  memory  of 
a  beautiful  romance  and  of  a  novelist  ^vho 
touched  the  heart  of  his  generation. 


192 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 


T  the  funeral  of  William 
Ciillen  Bryant  the  most  con- 
spicuous figure  was  Walt 
Whitman.  Far  apart  as  the 
two  men  were  in  educa- 
tion, association,  ideas,  and 
methods  of  art,  there  was  one 
striking  resemblance  between  them:  they  were 
both  elemental  poets  dealing  with  a  few  funda- 
mental things.  Bryant's  range  was  narrow, 
but  the  vastness  of  nature  in  the  New  World 
came  into  view  for  the  first  time  in  his  verse; 
and  what  he  lacked  in  breadth  was  supplied,  in 
part  at  least,  by  his  altitude  of  thought.  In 
Whitman's  verse,  on  the  other  hand,  the  sense 
of  space  is  pervasive ;  it  is  all  out-of-doors ;  from 

197 


AJMERICA  IX  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

every  point  the  horizons  are  visible.  One  misses 
the  heights  of  spiritual  vision,  the  power  and 
joy  in  moral  achievement;  but  one  feels  the 
presence,  in  an  original  and  powerful  way,  of 
the  most  inclusive  human  sympathy,  tlie  most 
sincere  human  fellowship. 

In  the  same  year  Whitman  spoke  on  Lincoln 
to  a  small  audience  in  a  New  York  theater,  made 
up  largely  of  men  and  women  interested  in  lit- 
erature. The  poet  was  then  in  his  sixtieth  year, 
but  looked  much  older:  a  large,  impressive  fig- 
ure, lacking  muscular  force  and  conveying  no 
impression  of  physical  strength,  but  massive, 
benignant,  with  a  certain  dignity  of  bulk  and 
carriage.  A  gray  suit,  carelessly  worn  but  ad- 
mirably harmonized  with  the  head  and  frame, 
suggested  that  the  poet  had  not  wholly  lost  the 
self -consciousness  with  which  he  began  his  ca- 
reer as  the  founder  of  a  new  school  of  song. 
His  face  was  large,  kindly,  and  warmly  tinted ; 
his  head  nobly  set  off  by  flowing  white  hair;  his 
bearing  toward  his  audience  free,  cordial,  and 
unaffected.  He  read  his  prose  as  he  wrote  it, 
with  frequent  parentheses,  pauses,  asides,  ex- 
cursions into  neighboring  subjects;  but  his  man- 

198 


AMERICA  IX  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

ner  had  flavor,  individuality,  native  quality. 
At  the  close  he  recited  "  O  Captain!  My  Cap- 
tain! "  with  such  simplicity  and  depth  of  feeling 
that  his  audience  felt  that  they  were  hearing  the 
noblest  man  of  the  heroic  age  celebrated  by  its 
most  rugged  and  powerful  bard. 

The  appearance  of  Whitman,  the  shape  of 
his  head,  the  detachment  of  his  life,  the  dithy- 
rambic  quality  of  his  verse  and  its  irregular  and 
uncertain  flow,  the  richness  of  his  lyrical  im- 
pulse and  the  uncertainty  of  his  judgment,  the 
broad,  elemental  conception  of  life  and  art 
which  he  held — all  these  things  suggest  the  bard, 
the  rhapsodical  singer  of  a  simple  society  and 
an  objective  age,  rather  than  the  many-sided  in- 
terpreter in  song  of  the  rich  complexity  of  mod- 
ern life.  A  primitive  person  Whitman  was  in 
many  ways;  and  he  shared  with  the  skalds, 
bards,  and  prophets  of  earlier  and  less  sophisti- 
cated races  much  of  their  affluence  and  sponta- 
neity of  expression,  their  rejection  of  the  subtle- 
ties and  refinements  of  art;  but  he  was  in  more 
respects  the  most  modern  of  poets.  In  his  con- 
ception of  society,  of  the  place  and  dignity  of 
tiie  individual,  of  the  worth  and  beauty  of  the 

199 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

body  and  all  its  functions,  in  his  use  of  forms 
of  poetic  expression,  in  his  hearty  acceptance 
of  science,  he  marks  the  extreme  reaction  against 
the  classical,  the  mediaeval,  the  aristocratic,  the 
{esthetic  ideals  of  the  past. 

In  his  rejection  of  the  accepted  verse-forms 
he  imagined  himself  creating  a  new  poetic  lan- 
guage vitall}^  adapted  to  the  expression  of  a 
new  poetic  thought;  while,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
he  was  reviving  and  remodeling  some  of  the 
oldest  verse-forms.  No  man,  however  radical 
in  instinct  and  intention,  ever  really  breaks  away 
from  his  race  and  creates  new  things  out  of  hand. 
The  race  is  far  greater  in  its  collective  genius 
and  experience  than  any  individual  member, 
and  the  most  original  man  must  be  content  to 
give  some  ancient  divination  a  clearer  statement, 
to  touch  some  old  experience  with  fresh  feeling, 
to  open  a  vista,  to  set  the  feet  of  men  again  on 
a  path  which  their  fathers  once  trod,  but  which 
they  left  for  some  other  and  more  inviting  road. 
Whitman  revives,  in  his  underlying  thought, 
one  of  the  oldest  Oriental  conceptions  of  the 
order  and  significance  of  life ;  in  his  verse-forms 
he  restores  and  gives  contemporary  currency 

200 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

to  ancient  methods  of  versification.  These  ele- 
ments in  his  work,  which  were  loudly  acclaimed 
as  novel,  are  of  a  hoary  antiquity;  what  is  new 
and  significant  in  him  is  his  resolute  acceptance 
of  the  democratic  order  in  all  its  logical  se- 
quences, his  instinctive  and  sane  feeling  that  if 
great  poetry  is  to  be  written  on  this  continent  it 
must  find  its  themes,  not  in  the  interests  of  the 
few,  but  in  the  occupation  and  experience  of  the 
many ;  above  all,  he  brought  to  his  work  a  vital, 
searching,  pictorial  imagination  of  great  com- 
pass and  power  of  illumination. 

There  is  much  that  is  repellent  in  his  work; 
much  that  is  coarse,  gross,  offensively  and  pe- 
dantically lacking  in  reticence,  in  regard  for  the 
sanctities  of  the  body  and  of  the  relations  be- 
tween men  and  women,  which  the  ascetic  and  the 
sensualist  have  alike  misunderstood  and  misin- 
terpreted. There  is  much  in  his  egotism,  his 
aggressive  and  ill-timed  assertion  of  himself; 
there  has  been  much,  too,  in  the  ill-advised  and 
unintelligent  advocacy  of  some  of  his  devotees, 
that  have  combined  to  keep  sane  readers  at  a 
distance.  These  advocates  have  too  often  taken 
the  attitude  toward  other  American  poets  that 

201 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

some  missionaries  have  taken  toward  the  gods 
of  the  countries  in  which  they  have  taught  a  new 
faith;  they  have  sent  them  all  to  perdition  to- 
gether. Students  of  literary  history  are  too 
familiar  with  mutations  of  taste  to  he  aif ected 
by  the  claims  of  exclusive  originality  in  any 
poet.  They  are  not  disturbed  about  the  security 
of  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  and  they  are  at 
ease  about  the  survival  of  Emerson  and  Poe. 
They  are  ready  to  accept  the  new,  but  they  do 
not  intend  to  reject  the  old;  for  the  old  that 
survives  is  always  new.  They  have  seen  the  ir- 
ruptions of  the  barbarians  before,  and  have 
heard  the  crash  of  the  falling  gods;  and  they 
have  lived  to  see  the  destroyers  not  only  replac- 
ing the  gods,  but  striving  with  pathetic  eager- 
ness to  recall  the  vanished  skill  which  long  ago 
imparted  the  touch  of  divinity.  The  new  artist 
succeeds  by  the  new  illustration  of  that  creative 
power  which  bears  in  every  age  immortal  fruit. 
If  Whitman  is  to  be  accepted  as  a  poetic  force 
of  high  authority,  it  will  not  be  by  dethroning 
his  predecessors,  but  by  establishing  his  right  to 
reign  with  them. 

The  real  contribution  made  by  Whitman  to 
202 


Old  Well  at  Huntington 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

American  literature  is  the  marvelously  vivid 
picture  of  a  democratic  society  in  its  workaday 
aspects,  its  primal  and  basal  instincts,  emotions, 
occupations.  In  a  very  real,  though  not  in  an 
exclusive  or  ultimate,  sense  he  is  the  poet  of  de- 
mocracy; that,  as  Professor  Dowden  and  other 
discerning  critics  beyond  the  sea  saw  when  his 
work  first  came  into  their  hands,  is  his  funda- 
mental significance,  his  original  quality.  In 
his  case,  therefore,  the  background  of  his  poetry 
is  one  of  its  formative  elements ;  it  furnished  the 
material  with  which  he  worked. 

That  man  is  fortunately  born  the  conditions 
of  whose  early  life  put  him  and  keep  him  in  in- 
timate and  vital  relation  with  the  kind  of  ex- 
perience, the  social  habits  and  circumstances, 
with  which  he  is  later  to  deal  with  original  in- 
sight and  power.  Whitman  was  born  in  a 
place  that  gave  easy  access  to  open  fields,  to  the 
sea,  and  to  great  cities,  and  in  a  condition  that 
brought  him  into  contact  with  working  America. 
He  and  Lanier  are  the  only  American  poets  of 
high  rank  who  have  been  born  out  of  New  Eng- 
land ;  and  there  is  in  them  both  a  quality  of  im- 
agination which  no  other  American  poets  pos- 

205 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

sess.  In  neither  was  there  that  balance  between 
inspiration  and  achievement,  that  equahty  of  in- 
sight with  expression,  which  the  greatest  singers 
possess,  but  both  disclosed  an  affluent  and  plastic 
imagination  of  a  new  order  in  this  country. 
Two  men  could  hardly  have  been  further  apart 
in  education,  ideal,  character;  but  they  are  the 
two  great  figures  in  the  opening  of  the  National 
period  which  followed  the  close  of  the  Civil 
War ;  and  a  century  hence,  when  American  lite- 
rature shall  have  struck  deep  into  the  almost 
unexplored  depths  of  American  life,  their  sig- 
nificance will  be  very  great. 

Whitman  was  born  at  West  Hills,  Long  Isl- 
and, on  May  31,  1819.  Dutch  and  English 
blood  was  in  his  veins,  and  he  was  the  child  of 
working  people,  farmers,  mechanics;  men  and 
women  who  used  their  hands  as  well  as  their 
brains.  On  the  father's  side  there  was  a  strain 
of  sluggishness  in  the  blood,  but  with  latent  im- 
petuosity and  vehemence  of  feeling  and  action 
on  occasion.  The  Quaker  tradition  had  ceased 
to  affect  the  dress  and  speech  of  the  family,  but 
it  bore  its  fruit  in  a  fundamental  faith  in  indi- 
vidual guidance  and  in  a  free  but  reverential 
attitude  toward  religion. 

206 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

The  elder  Whitman  had  been  a  carpenter, 
but  during  his  residence  in  West  Hills  was  a 
builder  of  excellent  reputation  for  skill  and 
thoroughness.  The  poet's  mother  was  a  large, 
quiet,  strong  woman,  with  little  education,  but 
of  a  deep  nature;  "benignant,  calm,  practical, 
spiritual  "  are  the  adjectives  with  which  her  son 
described  her.  The  house  in  which  Walt  Whit- 
man was  born,  which  is  still  standing,  was  al- 
ready a  century  old  at  his  birth,  and  the  farm 
had  been  in  possession  of  the  family  for  three 
generations — a  period  long  enough,  as  these 
things  are  reckoned  in  England,  to  make  a 
"  county  family." 

"  The  Whitmans,  at  the  beginning  of  the 
present  century,"  writes  Mr.  Burroughs,  "  lived 
in  a  long,  story-and-a-half  farm-house,  hugely 
timbered,  which  is  still  standing.  A  great 
smoke-canopied  kitchen,  with  vast  hearth  and 
chimney,  formed  one  end  of  the  house.  The 
existence  of  slavery  in  New  York  at  that  time, 
and  the  possession  by  the  family  of  some  twelve 
or  fifteen  slaves,  house  and  field  servants,  gave 
things  quite  a  patriarchal  look.  The  very  young 
darkies  could  be  seen,  a  swarm  of  them,  toward 
sundown,  in  this  kitchen,  squatted  in  a  circle 

207 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

on  tlie  floor,  eating  their  supper  of  Indian  pud- 
ding and  milk.      In  the  house,  and  in  food  and 
furniture,   all  was  rude  but  substantial.     No 
carpets  or  stoves  were  known,  and  no  coffee  and 
tea,  and  sugar  only  for  the  women.     Rousing 
wood  fires  gave  both  warmth  and  light  on  win- 
ter nights.    Pork,  poultry,  beef,  and  all  the  or- 
dinary vegetables   and  grains   were   plentiful. 
Cider  was  the  men's  common  drink,  and  used  at 
meals.      The   clothes   were   mainly   homespun. 
Journeys  were  made  by  both  men  and  women 
on  horseback.     Both  sexes  labored  with  their 
own  hands — the  men  on  the  farm,  the  women 
in  the  house  and  around  it.    Books  were  scarce. 
The  annual  copy  of  the  almanac  was  a  treat, 
and  was  pored  over  through  the  long  winter 
evenings.     I  must  not  forget  to  mention  that 
both  these  families  were  near  enough  to  the  sea 
to  behold  it  from  the  high  places,  and  to  hear  in 
still  hours  the  roar  of  the  surf ;  the  latter,  after 
a  storm,  giving  a  peculiar  sound  at  night.    Then 
all  hands,  male  and   female,  went  down  fre- 
quently on  beach  and  bathing  parties,  and  the 
men  on  practical  expeditions  for  cutting  salt 
hay,  and  for  clamming  and  fishing." 

208 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

A  county  family  in  the  English  sense  the 
Whitmans  were  not;  but  they  had  stayed  long 
enough  in  one  place,  and  been  long  enough  en- 
gaged in  work,  to  take  root  in  the  soil  and  to 
disclose  the  influence  of  long-continued  tasks  on 
a  succession  of  workers.  The  Whitmans  were 
large,  plain,  simple  people,  who  possessed  the 
elemental  things  of  life  and  cared  for  little  else ; 
they  showed  no  marked  intellectual  aptitudes; 
no  passion  for  education  appeared  in  any  gene- 
ration; they  were  industrious,  capable  working 
people,  curiously  devoid,  it  would  seem,  of  the 
American  ambition  to  "  get  on  "  in  life. 

As  a  bo}^  at  West  Hills,  and  later  in  Brook- 
lyn, Walt  Whitman  showed  the  out-of-doors 
habit  that  was  characteristic  of  the  family,  and 
spent  many  profitable  days  not  only  in  explor- 
ing the  western  end  of  Long  Island  from  the 
Sound  to  the  ocean,  but  in  letting  the  atmo- 
sphere of  the  woods  and  fields  envelop  and  color 
his  imagination.  He  was  then,  as  later,  a  loi- 
terer; a  habit  of  mind  and  body  that  made  him 
not  only  tolerant  of  "  loafers,"  but  disposed  to 
regard  "  loafing "  as  a  dignified  occupation. 
The  trouble  with  most  "  loafing  "  is  that  it  is 

209 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

unaccompanied  with  an  invitation  to  the  soul, 
to  recall  Whitman's  phrase,  to  be  at  ease  in 
the  world  and  share  its  growth  while  the  body 
is  quiescent. 

There  was  some  attendance  on  the  public 
schools,  but  at  thirteen  the  future  poet  went 
into  a  lawyer's  office;  then  turned  his  attention 
to  medicine;  became  a  printer;  taught  country 
schools;  wrote  for  the  country  newspapers;  es- 
tablished a  journal  of  his  own ;  passed  the  years 
from  1840  to  1845  in  New  York  as  a  compositor 
in  printing-offices,  spending  his  summers  in  the 
country  and  working  on  the  farm;  writing  es- 
says and  tales.  In  1842  he  published  "  Frank- 
lin Evans;  or,  The  Inebriate:  A  Tale  of  the 
Times,"  dedicated  to  the  Temperance  Societies. 
This  story  has,  fortunately,  disappeared;  its 
chief  characteristics,  according  to  the  report  of 
two  of  the  poet's  biographers,  were  "  its  flam- 
boyant phrase  "  and  "  its  puritan  odor  of  sanc- 
tity." Whitman's  later  work  did  not  entirely 
escape  the  fii'st  of  these  qualities ;  of  the  second 
not  a  trace  remained.  This  stage  of  his  life 
closed  with  two  years  of  editorial  work  on  the 
Brooklyn  "Eagle."     In  1848,  in  his  thirtieth 

210 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

year,  he  made  a  long  journey  through  the  Mid- 
dle, Southern,  and  Western  States,  ending  with 
a  visit  of  some  length  in  New  Orleans,  where  he 
became  intensely  interested  in  the  picturesque 
and  significant  aspects  of  Southern  life.  He 
returned  to  Brooklyn  and  to  journalism,  and 
finally  engaged  for  a  time  in  building  and  sell- 
ing houses  in  that  city.  In  1855  "  Leaves  of 
Grass  "  appeared,  and  his  life  entered  on  an 
entirely  different  stage. 

The  years  at  West  Hills,  in  Brooklyn  and 
New  York,  and  the  time  given  to  travel,  con- 
stitute the  educational  period  in  Whitman's  life ; 
and  while  he  was  entirely  familiar  with  some 
great  formative  books  and  deeply  influenced 
by  them,  he  was  trained  for  his  work  out-of- 
doors.  Few  men  have  known  so  many  kinds 
of  people  and  been  so  much  at  home  with  men 
simply  as  men.  Whitman  had  a  passion  for  hu- 
manity, without  reference  to  character,  educa- 
tion, occupation,  condition.  The  streets,  ferry- 
boats, tops  of  stages,  loafing-places,  were  dear 
to  him  because  they  gave  him  a  chance  to  see 
men  and  women  in  the  whole  range  of  the  con- 
ditions and  accidents  of  life. 

211 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

He  drew  no  lines  and  made  no  distinctions; 
the  saint  and  the  sinner,  the  nun  and  the  pros- 
titute, the  hero  and  the  criminal,  were  alike  to 
him  in  their  fundamental  appeal  to  his  in- 
terest. He  went  to  the  churches,  the  great  re- 
form meetings,  the  best  theaters;  and  he  went 
also  to  hospitals,  poorhouses,  prisons.  He  had 
friends  among  cultivated  people,  but  he  loved 
the  native  qualities  of  humanity,  and  was  most 
at  home  with  working  people — pilots,  masons, 
teamsters,  deck-hands,  mechanics  of  all  sorts; 
men  who  toil,  as  his  ancestors  had  toiled,  with 
the  hands.  He  went  wherever  people  were  to 
be  found,  and  spent  a  great  deal  of  time  in  the 
streets  and  at  popular  resorts  of  every  kind. 
"He  made  himself  familiar  with  all  kinds  of  em- 
ployments," writes  Dr.  Bucke,  "  not  by  read- 
ing trade  reports  and  statistics,  but  by  watching 
and  stopj)ing  hours  with  the  workmen  (often 
his  intimate  friends)  at  their  work.  He  visited 
the  foundries,  shops,  rolling-mills,  slaughter- 
houses, woolen  and  cotton  factories,  ship-j^ards, 
wharves,  and  the  big  carriage  and  cabinet  shops; 
went  to  clam-bakes,  races,  auctions,  weddings, 
sailing  and  bathing  parties,  christenings,  and  all 

212 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

kinds  of  merrymakings.  He  knew  every  New 
York  omnibus-driver,  and  found  them  both 
good  comrades  and  capital  materials  for  study. 
Indeed,  he  tells  us  that  the  influence  of  these 
rough,  good-hearted  fellows  (like  the  Broad- 
way stage-driver  in  '  To  Think  of  Time  ' )  un- 
doubtedly entered  into  the  gestation  of  '  Leaves 
of  Grass.'  No  scene  of  natural  beauty,  no  '  ap- 
ple-tree blows  of  white  and  pink  in  the  orchard,' 
no  lilac-bush  '  with  every  leaf  a  miracle,'  no 
'  gorgeous,  indolent,  sinking  sun,  burning,  ex- 
panding the  air,'  no  '  hurrying-tumbling  waves,' 
no  '  healthy  uplands,  with  herby-perf  umed 
breezes,'  give  him  greater  inspiration  than  the 
thronged  streets  of  New  York,  with  the  '  inter- 
minable eyes,'  with  the  life  of  the  theater,  bar- 
room, huge  hotel,  the  saloon  of  the  steamer, 
the  crowded  excursion,  '  Manhattan  crowds, 
with  their  turbulent  musical  chorus,'  the  rush- 
ing torrent,  the  never-ceasing  roar,  of  modern 
human  life."  He  was  no  stranger,  however, 
in  libraries  and  museums,  and  his  walks  afield 
were  long  and  fruitful.  With  his  knapsack,  a 
bit  of  luncheon,  a  copy  of  Shakespeare  or  Ho- 
mer, he  spent  long  solitary  days  on  the  sea-shore, 

213 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

often  reciting  aloud  like  the  older  bards  whose 
lineal  descendant  he  was.  He  was  sensitive  to 
music,  and  the  opera  gave  him  unqualified  de- 
light. He  described  the  once  famous  contralto 
Alboni  as  "  the  blooming  mother,  sister  of  lofti- 
est Gods."  He  knew  Wagner's  music  only  by 
report,  but  that  he  divined  something  of  its  sig- 
nificance is  evident  from  his  remark:  "  I  know 
from  the  way  you  fellows  talk  of  it  that  the 
music  of  Wagner  is  the  music  of  the  '  Leaves.'  " 
So  far  Whitman  had  seen  life  chiefly  and  by 
choice  in  its  fundamental  occupations,  its  sim- 
plest aspects ;  he  was  now  to  see  it  on  the  tragic 
side,  and  to  be  profoundly  touched  and  influ- 
enced by  it.  In  the  second  j^ear  of  the  Civil 
War  he  went  to  Washington  and  became  a  vol- 
unteer nurse  in  the  army  hospitals,  supporting 
himself  by  writing  letters  to  the  New  York 
"  Times."  At  the  close  of  the  war  he  became 
a  clerk  in  the  Interior  Department,  a  position 
from  which  he  was  unwisely  removed  because 
of  certain  passages  in  the  "  Leaves  of  Grass." 
Later  he  obtained  a  place  in  the  Treasury  De- 
partment, which  he  retained  until  1873,  when 
he  was  partially  disabled  by  a  slight  stroke  of 

214 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

paralysis.  In  the  spring  of  that  year  he  re- 
moved to  Camden,  N.  J.,  where  he  had  a  modest 
home  and  saw  many  friends.  His  means  were 
very  limited,  but  they  were  supplemented  by  the 
devotion  of  his  friends.  His  health  was  much 
impaired,  but  his  cheerfulness  was  unclouded. 
There,  on  the  26th  of  March,  1892,  he  died,  and 
lies  buried  in  a  Camden  cemetery. 

Against  the  background  of  childhood,  youth, 
and  the  years  of  active  and  of  reflective  life, 
sketched  in  the  simplest  lines.  Whitman  stands 
out  with  great  distinctness  and  in  striking  con- 
trast with  his  peers  among  American  men  of 
letters.  With  one  exception,  they  were  univer- 
sity-bred men,  born  into  the  gentlest  and  best 
social  traditions,  within  reach  of  the  ripest  in- 
tellectual influences,  in  touch  with  the  finest 
expressions  of  the  human  spirit  in  its  long 
historic  unfolding.  Whitman's  heritage  was 
of  a  diff'erent  kind ;  the  influences  which  touched 
him  immediately  and  most  powerfully  issued 
out  of  contemporaneous  life;  he  knew  a  few 
books  well,  and  they  were  among  the  great- 
est— the  Bible,  Homer  in  translation,  Shake- 
speare, Don  Quixote;  he  read  Hegel,  Tenny- 

215 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

son,  Emerson,  Carlyle,  and  other  typical  modern 
writers;  but  he  found  his  material  and  his  in- 
spiration in  the  America  which  he  saw  with  his 
eyes,  touched  with  his  hand,  and  divined  with 
his  heart — the  America  of  active  life,  of  co- 
lossal energy,  of  native  manliness,  of  free, 
unconventional,  friendly  living.  This  America 
of  the  farm,  the  workshop,  the  railroad,  the 
prairie,  the  mining  camp,  the  rushing,  tumultu- 
ous play  of  elemental  forces,  he  saw  with  a  clear- 
ness of  vision  that  no  other  poet  has  possessed, 
and  described  with  a  freshness  and  boldness  of 
phrase  that  give  incontrovertible  evidence  of  real 
poetic  power.  This  physical  and  social  America 
is  the  background  of  his  poetry ;  and  in  making 
it  his  background  A^Hiitman  struck  his  one  ori- 
ginal note  and  made  his  one  contribution  to  our 
literature. 

An  English  critic  has  said  recently  of  Wil- 
liam Morris  that,  passionate  as  was  his  reaction 
against  the  ugliness  of  contemporary  life  and 
his  determination  to  bring  the  beautiful  back  to 
its  old  place  and  function,  his  inability  to  turn 
a  personal  conviction  into  an  overwhelming 
movement  was  evidenced  by  his  failure  to  give 

216 


The  Garden  of  Whitman  s  House  in  Camden 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

common,  modern,  useful  things  beautiful  forms. 
He  could  give  a  chest  or  chair  or  table  the  ex- 
quisite symmetry  or  the  massive  lines  which  they 
had  in  their  best  estate,  but  he  did  not  give  us 
artistic  lamp-posts  and  letter-boxes.  Whitman 
did  precisely  this ;  he  took  the  roughest  material 
close  at  hand,  and  not  only  divined  its  poetic 
significance,  but  resolutely  set  himself  the  task 
of  making  others  recognize  it.  He  was,  fortu- 
nately, so  accustomed  to  uncouthness,  rough- 
ness, crudity,  that  these  early  conditions  of  all 
vital  things  did  not  repel  him ;  on  the  contrary, 
they  appealed  to  his  imagination.  He  had 
grown  up  with  them  and  made  friends  with 
them  in  those  sensitive  hours  when  the  imagi- 
nation forms  its  intimacies;  and  the  great 
rough,  crude  life  of  the  new  continent  opened 
its  heart  to  him.  Other  poets  had  divined  what 
was  in  the  American  spirit  and  had  heard  notes 
that  escaped  him,  but  Whitman  was  the  first 
poet  to  get  into  his  verse  the  continental  volume 
of  American  life,  its  vast  flow  through  the  chan- 
nels of  a  thousand  occupations,  its  passionate 
practice  of  equality,  its  resolute  assertion  of  the 
sanctity  of  the  individual,  its  insistence  on  the 

219 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

supreme  value  of  the  native  as  against  the  ac- 
quired traits  and  qualities. 

That  Whitman  lost  perspective  and  blurred 
the  scale  of  values  bj^  breaking  even  partially 
with  the  long  line  of  those  who,  in  the  days 
before  him,  had  seen  life  at  first  hand  is  clear 
enough;  but  it  may  have  been  necessary  for 
some  poet  to  take  democracy  in  its  most  elemen- 
tary form,  without  shading  or  qualification,  to 
clear  the  way  for  the  greater  poet  who  will  some 
day  speak  out  of  a  knowledge  as  searching,  a 
sympathy  as  profound,  but  with  a  clearer  dis- 
cernment of  spiritual  degrees  and  orders.  Whit- 
man did  what  no  other  poet  had  done:  he  ac- 
cepted not  only  the  democratic  ideal,  but  the  life 
organized  under  it,  without  qualification,  and 
with  a  deep  joy  in  the  new  disclosure  of  the 
human  spirit,  the  fresh  evocation  of  human  en- 
ergy, which  it  effected.  Here  and  now,  he  de- 
clared, the  American  poet  must  claim  his  hour 
and  his  material;  in  the  meanest  and  the  worst 
the  soul  of  goodness  survives,  in  the  roughest 
and  crudest  the  soul  of  beauty  hides  itself.  Some 
of  that  goodness  he  evoked,  some  of  that  beauty 
he  made  manifest.     His  attitude  is  expressed 

220 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

in  lines  which  are  prosaic  in  form  but  which  re- 
veal his  point  of  view  and  suggest  the  sources 
of  his  inspiration : 

I  hear  America  singing,  the  varied  carols  I  hear, 

Those  of  mechanics,  each  one  singing  his  as  it  should 
be  blithe  and  strong; 

The  carpenter  singing  his  as  he  measures  his  plank 
or  beam, 

The  mason  singing  his  as  he  makes  ready  for  work,  or 
leaves  off  work. 

The  boatman  singing  what  belongs  to  him  in  his 
boat,  the  deck-hand  singing  on  the  steamboat  deck, 

The  shoemaker  singing  as  he  sits  on  his  bench,  the  hat- 
ter singing  as  he  stands, 

The  wood-cutter's  song,  the  ploughboy's  on  his  way  in 
the  morning,  or  at  noon  intermission  or  at  sun- 
down. 

The  delicious  singing  of  the  mother,  or  of  the  young 
wife  at  work,  or  of  the  girl  sewing  or  washing. 

Each  singing  what  belongs  to  him  or  her  and  to  none 
else, 

The  day  what  belongs  to  the  day — at  night  the  party 
of  young  fellows,  robust,  friendly, 

Singing  with  open  mouths  their  strong  melodious  songs. 

Emerson  expressed  the  American  spirit  with 
singular  clarity  and  beauty  of  phrase ;  Whitman 
expressed  the  volume  and  range  of  American 
life;  the  greater  poet  who  is  to  come  will  com- 

221 


AMERICA  IX  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

pass  both  spirit  and  body.  He  will  honor  man 
as  man,  labor  as  labor,  the  common  use  because 
it  is  common,  as  ^Vhitman  honored  these  things ; 
he  will  exalt  the  basal  elements;  but  he  will 
not  rest  in  these  primary  stages  of  growth; 
he  will  not  set  the  man  in  his  undeveloped 
strength  in  antagonism  with  the  man  in  his 
trained  and  ordered  maturity. 

The  mistake  which  many  Whitman  devotees 
have  made  is  an  old  and  familiar  one ;  they  have 
set  the  crude  man  in  antagonism  to  the  devel- 
oped man;  they  have  decried  refinement,  deli- 
cacy, sensitiveness,  as  signs  of  weakness  and 
exalted  the  elementary  forms  of  power  as  the 
only  kinds  of  power.  The  cowboy  and  the 
miner  are  picturesque  figures,  but  the  force  they 
represent  is  not  a  whit  more  normal  and  is  far 
less  highly  organized  than  that  of  countless  in- 
trepid, accomplished  men  who  are  carrying  the 
burdens  of  society  and  doing  its  work  in  all 
departments  without  publicitj'^  or  craving  for 
applause.  We  need  to  get  back  to  the  primitive 
qualities  from  time  to  time,  and  it  is  a  sugges- 
tive fact  that,  as  a  rule,  it  is  those  who  are  over- 
trained on  some  side  who  are  clamorous  for  a 

222 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

return  to  primitive  types  and  modes.  But  na- 
ture does  not  rest  in  these  lower  types;  she 
steadily  perfects  her  types  by  development.  In 
the  reaction  against  the  conventional,  artificial, 
purely  academic  view  of  things,  it  is  sometimes 
necessary  to  break  a  few  windows ;  but  breaking 
windows  is  always  a  temporary  measure.  Cul- 
ture in  the  true  sense  is  simply  the  process  of 
growth,  and  the  man  who  fulfils  his  life  by  un- 
folding all  his  powers  is  a  more  natural  man 
than  he  who  has  suffered  an  arrest  of  his  de- 
velopment. Democracy  cannot  change  the  laws 
which  govern  human  life ;  it  will  be  a  great  gain 
if  it  can  bring  in  simplicity  of  living ;  it  is  quite 
certain  that  it  cannot  and  ought  not  to  preserve 
native  flavor  by  retarding  normal  growth. 
American  literature  will  never  become  power- 
ful by  the  exaltation  of  the  rough,  the  crude, 
the  unclean;  what  it  lacks  is  not  frankness,  but 
the  original  power  which  pierces  to  the  heart  of 
society  and  lays  bare  its  dramatic  significance 
as  Thackeray  did  in  "  Vanity  Fair."  Great 
writers  do  not  need  to  be  either  profane  or  ob- 
scene. 

Whitman  was  a  pathfinder,  and  his  joy  in  the 
223 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

great  new  world  of  human  experience  that  he 
explored  no  one  would  take  from  him.  It  will  be 
seen  some  day  that  there  was  a  true  prophetic 
strain  in  him,  and  that  he  marked  the  beginning, 
not  of  a  new  kind  of  literature,  but  of  a  new 
and  National  stage  of  literary  development  in 
this  country.  In  his  verse  the  sections  disappear 
and  the  Nation  comes  into  view,  the  provinces 
fade  and  the  continent  defines  itself.  It  is  man 
at  work  over  a  continent  that  stirs  him ;  he  cele- 
brates few  persons ;  Lincoln  alone  seems  to  have 
moved  him  profoundly;  even  when  he  cele- 
brates himself  it  is  as  a  kind  of  incarnation  and 
embodiment  of  human  qualities  and  experiences. 
In  this  attitude  he  was  instinctively  expressing 
his  conception  of  Democracy  as  a  vast  brother- 
hood, in  which  all  men  are  on  an  equality,  irre- 
spective of  individual  traits  and  qualities. 

There  is  nothing  finer  in  Whitman  than  his 
passion  for  comradeship;  in  his  idealization  of 
the  fellowship  between  man  and  man  he  not 
only  sounded  some  great,  sincere  notes,  but  he 
struck  out  some  great  lines  in  the  heat  of  a  feel- 
ing which  seems  always  to  have  had  quick  ac- 
cess to  his  imagination.     To  this  all-embracing 

224 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

affection,  so  deeph^  rooted  in  his  conception  of 
the  democratic  order,  he  devotes  a  large  group 
of  poems  under  the  title  "  Calamus."  These 
friends  of  the  spirit  are  not  chosen  by  any  prin- 
ciple of  taste;  they  are  chiefly  "powerful  un- 
educated persons  " : 

I  am  enamour'd  of  growing  out-doors, 

Of  men  that  live  among  cattle  or  taste  of  the  ocean  or 

woods, 
Of  the  builders  and  steerers  of  ships  and  the  wielders  of 

axes  and  mauls,  and  the  drivers  of  horses, 
I  can  eat  and  sleep  with  them  week  in  and  week  out. 

It  cannot  be  said  with  justice  that  Whitman 
erases  all  moral  distinctions  and  rejects  entirely 
the  scale  of  spiritual  values;  but  it  is  quite  cer- 
tain that  he  blurs  them,  and  reduces  his  world 
to  unity  by  putting  aside  resolutely  the  prin- 
ciple of  selection.  His  underlying  religious  con- 
ception of  life  is  essentially  Oriental,  and  dates 
back  to  the  time  before  the  idea  of  personality 
had  been  clearly  grasped.  This  principle  Whit- 
man does  not  consistently  apply,  for  he  lays 
tremendous  emphasis  on  "  powerful  uneducated 
persons  " ;  but  in  a  certain  sense  it  is  wrought 
into  his  presentation  of  the  democratic  society. 

225 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

In  that  presentation  individuals  sink  into  the 
vast  community  whose  naked  energy,  power, 
vigor,  and  habit  the  poet  loves  to  paint.  Neither 
in  life  nor  in  art,  in  the  material  which  he  uses 
nor  in  the  form  in  which  he  casts  it,  does  he  em- 
ploy that  skill  in  selection  which  is  one  of  the 
prime  gifts  of  the  artist.  Whitman  shows,  as  a 
consequence,  no  power  of  self-criticism ;  no  abil- 
ity to  distinguish  the  good  from  the  bad  in  his 
work,  to  separate  poetry  from  prose.  He  has  left 
a  few  pieces  of  unique  quality  of  imagination 
and  harmony  embedded  in  a  great  mass  of  unor- 
ganized poetic  material.  In  reading  him  one 
feels  as  if  he  were  going  through  a  vast  atelier 
crowded  with  blocks  of  unhewn  marble  and  huge 
piles  of  debris,  with  here  and  there  a  statue  of 
noble  and  even  majestic  proportions.  Whitman 
is  easily  travestied,  but  no  one  has  ever  done  this 
impious  thing  half  so  well  as  he  did  himself  in 
some  of  his  most  pretentious  pieces.  His  devo- 
tees would  render  him  the  truest  service  if  they 
would  stop  clianting  his  praise  and  thoroughly 
and  critically  edit  his  works. 

Whitman's    great    gift    is    his    imagination, 
which  is  deep,  fervent,  pictorial,  penetrating; 

226 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

an  imagination,  in  force,  volume,  and  power  of 
flooding  a  great  theme,  quite  beyond  anything 
in  our  hterature.  In  the  New  England  poets 
generally  the  thinking  faculty  is  more  powerful 
than  the  faculty  which  makes  images;  this  is 
the  limitation  of  our  earlier  poets.  There  is  too 
much  intellect,  which  analyzes,  separates,  and 
defines,  and  too  little  imagination,  which  fuses, 
combines,  and  personifies.  At  his  best.  Whit- 
man's imagination  has  a  tidal  movement  and 
depth.  When  "  Out  of  the  Cradle  Endlessly 
Rocking  "  is  read,  with  that  intelligence  of  feel- 
ing which  keeps  the  thought  and  tune  in  unison 
and  makes  them  mutually  interpretative,  the 
sensitive  listener  is  aware  of  a  power  which  lies 
deeper  than  that  put  forth  by  any  other  Ameri- 
can poet,  and  which  has  an  elemental  energy 
and  sweep;  as  if  nature  had  conspired  with  the 
poet  and  given  his  song  a  touch  of  her  mys- 
tery and  the  ultimate  music  of  those  secret  pro- 
cesses which  build,  out  of  sight,  the  beauty  of 
the  world.  In  such  poems  as  "  The  Mystic 
Trumpeter,"  the  "  Passage  to  India,"  "  When 
Lilacs  Last  in  the  Dooryard  Bloom'd,"  "  Out 
of  the  Cradle  Endlessly  Rocking,"   "  O   Cap- 

229 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

tain!  ISly  Captain!  "  Whitman  establishes  him- 
self, not  only  among  the  first  of  our  poets,  but, 
in  respect  of  imaginative  power,  the  first  of  the 
goodly  company.  This  free  and  noble  use  of 
the  creative  faculty,  at  once  unconventional  and 
obedient  to  the  law  of  art,  is  revealed  in  such 
lines  as  these: 

Here  are  our  thoughts,  voyager^ s  thoughts. 

Here  not  the  land,  firm  land,  alone  appears,  may  then 
by  them  be  said, 

The  sky  overarches  here,  we  feel  the  undulating  deck  be- 
neath our  feet. 

We  feel  the  long  pulsation,  ebb  and  flow  of  endless 
motion. 

The  tones  of  unseen  mystery,  the  vague  and  vast  sug- 
gestions of  the  briny  world,  the  Uqu id-flowing 
syllables. 

The  perfume,  the  faint  creaking  of  the  cordage,  the 
melancholy  rhythm. 

The  boundless  vista  and  the  horizon  far  and  dim  are 
all  here. 

And  this  is  ocean's  poem. 

Such  passages  as  this,  vital,  fresh,  deeply 
suggestive,  full  of  the  eternal  movement  of 
things,  show  the  elemental  power  of  this  ex- 
traordinary man  to  whom  nature  gave  so  much ; 
but  this  great  gift  was  beset  with  marked  limi- 

230 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

tations,  and  the  spring  of  pure  song  often 
gushes  out  in  a  dreary  waste  of  long-drawn-out 
categories  and  vast  stretches  of  barren  prose. 

Whitman,  like  Wordsworth,  took  himself  at 
all  times  as  one  inspired ;  but  with  him,  as  with 
the  author  of  the  Ecclesiastical  Sonnets,  there 
were  long  periods  of  uninspired  dullness.  And 
there  is  no  conformity  so  monotonous  as  that 
of  the  nonconformist.  Whitman's  irregular 
dithyrambic  verse  is  immensely  impressive  when 
the  full  tide  of  his  imagination  floods  it,  but 
when  that  tide  is  out  it  becomes  machinery  of 
the  most  ponderous  kind.  Much  has  been  said 
about  this  verse  as  something  new  in  the  world ; 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  belongs  to  very  ancient 
poetry.  That  diminishes  not  a  whit  the  great- 
ness of  Whitman's  achievement,  but  it  keeps 
us  to  the  fact,  which  is  quite  essential  in  any 
adequate  judgment  of  a  man's  work.  Much  has 
been  said  also  about  this  verse  as  belonging  to 
nature  rather  than  to  art;  as  if  art  were  some- 
thing other  than  the  best  and  therefore  the  most 
natural  way  of  doing  a  thing.  And  so  sound  a 
critic  as  Mr.  Burroughs  has  spoken,  in  this  con- 
nection, of  Tennyson  and  Browning  as  "  liter- 

231 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

ary  poets";  implying,  apparently,  that  Whit- 
man was  of  a  different  kind.  Now,  in  so  far 
as  Whitman  was  a  poet  he  was  a  literary  poet; 
when  he  is  at  his  best  his  verse  conforms  to  cer- 
tain laws  of  art  as  truly  as  the  verse  of  the  great 
poets  who  went  before  him.  When  he  ceases  to 
be  literary  in  this  sense,  he  ceases  to  be  interest- 
ing. Nature  and  art  are  never  antagonistic; 
they  are  supplementary.  Whitman  did  not 
react  against  art,  but  against  artifice,  which  is 
a  very  different  matter.  That  Whitman  had 
the  feeling  for  art,  for  that  order  which  reveals 
without  intruding  the  most  vital  relations,  is 
evident  not  only  in  his  work  at  its  best,  but  in 
his  strikingl}^  effective  arrangement  of  his  verse 
and  prose  in  the  forms  in  which  he  finally  gave 
them  to  the  world. 

No  one  has  defined  more  impressively  than 
Whitman  the  quality  in  writing  which  gives  it 
that  life  that  is  always  synonymous  with  the 
highest  art: 

"  The  art  of  art,  the  glory  of  expression  and 
the  sunshine  of  the  light  of  letters  is  simplicity. 
Nothing  is  better  than  simplicity  .  .  .  nothing 
can  make  up  for  excess  or  for  the  lack  of  defi- 

232 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

niteness.  To  carry  on  the  heave  of  impulse  and 
pierce  intellectual  depths  and  give  all  subjects 
their  articulations  are  powers  neither  common 
nor  very  uncommon.  But  to  speak  in  literature 
with  the  perfect  rectitude  and  insouciance  of  the 
movements  of  animals  and  the  unimpeachable- 
ness  of  the  sentiment  of  trees  in  the  woods  and 
grass  by  the  roadside  is  the  flawless  triumph  of 
art.  If  you  have  looked  on  him  who  has 
achieved  it  you  have  looked  on  one  of  the  mas- 
ters of  the  artists  of  all  nations  and  times." 

Nothing  could  be  more  just  and  penetrating 
than  this  definition  of  the  quality  of  a  great 
writer;  by  this  definition  Whitman's  work  must 
be  tried;  applying  this  test  to  that  work,  it  ap- 
pears that  some  of  it  will  survive  and  much  of 
it  will  be  cast  aside.  The  race  is  already  too 
heavily  encumbered  with  luggage  of  all  sorts; 
all  the  great  writers  must  submit  to  a  rigid  re- 
examination from  time  to  time;  and  Whitman 
will  not  be  exempt  from  a  test  which  has  been 
applied  to  Goethe,  to  Wordsworth,  and  to  By- 
ron. And  it  may  be  suspected  that  Whitman 
succeeds  greatly  where  he  conforms  most  closely 
to  the  great  tradition  of  art  which  is  the  faithful 

233 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

and  devout  practice  of  all  the  great  poets,  and 
that  he  fails  most  lamentably  where  he  attempts 
deliberately  to  create  a  new  method.  It  is  quite 
certain  that  in  his  case,  as  in  that  of  Browning, 
the  devotees  have  exalted  his  eccentricities  and 
belittled  his  sanest  and  truest  work.  A  man  of 
original  force  like  Whitman  has  far  more  to 
fear  from  injudicious  and  uncritical  friends 
than  from  scornful  and  unsjinpathetic  enemies. 
In  his  exaltation  of  the  body  Whitman's 
thought  is  less  gross  than  his  speech ;  and  at  his 
worst  his  coarse  frankness  is  more  wholesome 
than  the  subtle  and  less  offensive  but  far  more 
corrupt  treatment  of  such  themes  by  some  of 
the  contemporary  writers  of  the  decadent  school. 
Compared  with  the  exquisitely  artistic  corrup- 
tion which  D'Annunzio  analyzes  and  depicts 
with  such  searching  insight,  Whitman's  nudity 
of  image  and  phrase  is  health  itself.  The  ob- 
jection to  Whitman's  handling  of  these  delicate 
and  profoundly  significant  relations  is  not  that 
it  is  unclean,  but  that  it  is  inartistic.  It  is  not 
immoral  in  the  sense  that  it  is  corrujit,  but  it  is 
immoral  because  it  violates  that  instinct  of  reti- 
cence which  protects  these  relations  by  keeping 

234 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

fresh  the  sentiment  which  invests  them  with  the 
poetry  of  the  creative  process.  This  poetry 
Whitman  ruthlessly  destroys  by  denuding  the 
whole  mysterious  relation  of  its  mystery.  In 
nothing  does  he  more  clearly  reveal  the  curious 
artistic  blindness  which  sometimes  made  him  the 
most  Philistine  of  poets  than  in  this  lack  of 
sensitiveness  to  the  delicacy,  the  spiritual  sug- 
gestiveness,  the  deep  and  essential  privacy  of 
relations  which  belong  to  the  most  intimate  life 
and  which  become  brutal  the  moment  they  be- 
come public. 

The  lack  of  fineness  in  Whitman,  the  insen- 
sibility to  the  appeal  of  the  spiritual  qualities 
of  character,  the  absence  of  the  note  of  distinc- 
tion, are  very  obvious  when  one  studies  his  work 
in  its  relation  to  women;  there  is  nowhere  any 
touch  of  the  spiritual  chivalry  which  nearly  all 
the  great  poets  have  shared;  no  suggestion  of 
the  power  of  beautiful  portraiture  with  which 
Homer,  Dante,  Shakespeare,  and  Goethe,  for 
instance,  have  enriched  the  world  with  the  im- 
ages of  Andromache,  Beatrice,  Rosalind,  Gret- 
chen.  The  "  dream  of  fair  women  "  seems  never 
to  have  come  to  Whitman;  if  it  had,  he  could 

235 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

not  possibly  have  treated  the  most  intimate  rela- 
tion between  men  and  women  as  if  it  were  a 
public  function.  There  was  a  whole  world  of 
poetry  from  which,  by  the  limitation  of  his  na- 
ture, this  powerful  man  was  excluded.  And 
this  is  the  more  singular  because  his  was  not  a 
purely  masculine  genius ;  there  was  a  large  infu- 
sion of  the  feminine  in  it.  It  is  not  so  much 
sheer  force  and  energy  that  impress  one  in 
Whitman  as  a  certain  diffused  softness  of 
feeling,  a  brooding  affection,  a  seeking  after 
and  celebration  of  brotherliness,  comradeship; 
most  notably,  in  his  striking  and  original  treat- 
ment of  death  the  element  of  tenderness  is  deli- 
cately and  beautifully  expressed. 

So  many  and  so  various  are  the  qualities  which 
Whitman  reveals,  so  diverse  are  the  moods  with 
which  one  reads  him,  that  the  very  difficulty  of 
reaching  a  final  judgment  regarding  his  genius 
and  rank  becomes  an  evidence  of  something  un- 
usual and  commanding  in  the  man.  It  is  high 
time,  surely,  to  see  him  as  he  is;  to  escape  the 
blindness  of  those  who  have  never  l^een  able  to 
find  anything  but  the  "  barbaric  yawp  "  in  him, 
and  the  idolatry  of  those  who  think  that  he  has 

236 


A  Byway  in  Huntington 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

abolished  the  laws  of  art.  He  was  great  in 
mass  and  magnitude  rather  than  in  altitude  and 
quality;  he  had  the  richest  endowment  of  im- 
agination that  has  yet  been  bestowed  on  any 
American  poet,  but  his  power  of  organizing  it 
into  noble  and  beautiful  forms  was  far  below  the 
wealth  of  his  material;  he  had  an  ear  for  the 
fundamental  rhythms,  but  he  often  disregarded 
or  violated  his  musical  sense.  He  entered  into 
the  broad,  elemental  life  of  the  country  and 
caught  its  sweep  of  interest  and  occupation  with 
fresh  and  original  power,  disclosing  at  times  a 
passion  of  imagination  which  closely  approaches 
great  poetry  and  predicts  the  great  poetry  which 
will  some  day  be  written  on  this  continent. 
Here  Whitman  is  at  his  best  and  stands  out  as, 
in  a  very  real  sense,  the  distinctively  American 
poet — the  devout  lover  of  democracy  and  its 
most  ardent  and  eloquent  singer.  But  even  here 
there  are  limitations  to  be  observed;  for  Whit- 
man speaks  for  a  plane  of  society,  not  for  its 
entirety;  he  cares  for  and  understands  the  ele- 
mental and  basal  types ;  he  does  not  comprehend 
nor  recognize  the  sharing  of  the  great  human 
qualities  on  a  basis  of  equality  by  the  more 

239 


AJNIERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

highly  developed  types.  And  democracy,  it 
must  be  remembered,  does  not  mean  the  average 
man  only;  it  means  all  men. 

Whitman  has  a  fundamentally  religious  view 
of  life  which  makes  him  brother  with  all  men 
and  in  sympathy  with  all  experience;  but  he 
has  no  affinity  with  the  higher  and  holier  attain- 
ments of  character;  he  fails  to  recognize  the 
immense  chasm  which  yawns  between  the  saint 
and  the  deliberate  and  persistent  sinner,  which 
may  be  bridged  hereafter,  but  which  is,  now 
and  here,  a  tremendous  fact.  He  is,  at  his  best, 
master  of  a  fresh,  suggestive,  deeply  impressive 
phrase,  which  brings  with  it  something  of  the 
immediate  and  convincing  cogency  and  charm 
of  nature ;  at  his  worst  he  is  ponderous,  prosaic, 
and  eminently  uninspired.  When  his  inspira- 
tion ebbs,  he  stereotypes  himself.  He  has  writ- 
ten a  little  group  of  poems  which  are  more  dis- 
tinctive and  original  than  any  others  that  have 
come  from  an  American  hand ;  he  has  written  a 
vast  mass  of  irregular  verse  which  has  no  pos- 
sible relation  to  poetry,  and  which  ought,  as 
a  matter  of  justice  to  his  genius  and  memory, 
to  be  separated  from  his  real  work  and  put  into 

240 


AVhitnuin's  Grave  at  Camden 


AMERICA  IN  WHITMAN'S  POETRY 

that  storage-room  to  which  most  of  the  great 
writers  have  made  unwiUing  contributions.  Af- 
ter this  has  been  done  there  will  remain  a  small 
body  of  verse  that  is  likely  to  last  as  long  as  any- 
thing in  American  poetry. 


243 


THE  LAND  OF  SCOTT 


THE  LAND  OF  SCOTT 


R.  LANG  has  said  that,  of- 
ten as  it  has  been  his  for- 
tune to  write  about  Sir  Wal- 
ter Scott,  he  has  never  sat 
down  to  do  so  without  a 
sense  of  happiness  and  ela- 
tion. "  It  is,"  he  writes,  "  as 
if  one  were  meeting  a  dear  friend,  or  at  least 
were  to  talk  with  other  friends  about  him.  This 
emotion  is  so  strong,  no  doubt,  because  the  name 
and  memory  and  magic  of  Sir  Walter  are 
entwined  with  one's  earliest  recollections  of 
poetry,  and  nature,  and  the  vines  and  hills  of 
home."  It  is  easy,  and  of  late  years  it  has  been 
a  kind  of  literary  convention,  to  emphasize  the 
defects  in  Scott's  work ;  its  loose  and  often  awk- 

249 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

ward  construction,  the  verbositj^  of  the  style,  the 
lack  of  selection  and  the  consequent  overcrowd- 
ing of  the  story,  the  carelessness  of  a  born  ra- 
conteur who  has  more  incidents  at  command 
than  he  can  wisely  use.  These  faults  are  so 
obvious  that  it  is  unnecessar}^  to  recall  them. 
There  is,  however,  something  humorous  in  the 
patronizing  attitude  of  a  little  group  of  very 
modern,  deft,  expert  framers  of  sentences  to- 
ward this  large,  friendly,  affluent  mind,  this 
warm,  generous,  gracious  spirit,  who  shares  with 
Shakespeare,  Lope  de  Vega,  Dumas,  and  Vic- 
tor Hugo  the  indifference  of  the  possessor  of 
a  great  fortune  to  the  details  of  his  bequests  to 
his  kind.  Scott  ought  to  have  been  more  stu- 
dious of  form,  more  fastidious  of  style;  he 
ought  to  have  written  with  more  deliberation 
and  revised  with  more  rigor;  but  when  all  these 
defects  are  charged  up  against  him,  how  heavily 
the  language  and  the  race  remain  indebted  to 
him,  and  how  painfully  lacking  in  perception 
is  the  criticism  which  reports  the  shadows  but 
ignores  the  light  which  streams  from  this  great- 
hearted man! 

If  the  claim  of  the  author  of  "  Quentin  Dur- 
250 


o 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

ward  "  to  a  large  place  in  the  literature  of  the 
English-speaking  peoples  could  not  be  estab- 
lished by  putting  his  works  in  evidence,  the 
charm  of  his  personality  and  the  story  of  his 
heroic  struggle  to  die  with  honor  would  invest 
him  with  a  human  and  romantic  interest  of  the 
kind  which  gives  wings  to  certain  names  and 
sends  them  on  a  level  flight  with  time. 

The  sensitiveness  to  form  as  form,  the  deli- 
cacy of  taste  in  detail,  the  nice  feeling  for  the 
subtle  relations  between  thought  and  speech, 
the  light  touch  on  the  magical  elements  in  lan- 
guage, which  constitute  the  artistic  equipment 
of  Poe,  De  Maupassant,  Pater,  and  Henry 
James,  are  not  to  be  found  in  Scott ;  he  belongs 
to  another  order  of  artists,  another  class  of  those 
who  minister  to  the  needs  of  the  spirit.  Even 
these  accomplished  writers  present  large  arid 
surfaces  and  are  at  times  unconscionable  of- 
fenders against  the  very  taste  they  cultivate. 
Poe  permits  himself  the  most  repulsive  detail 
in  the  introduction  of  horrors  from  which  the 
sensitive  instinctively  turn  away;  Mr.  James 
was  once  described  by  a  friendly  critic  of  notable 
sanity  as  "on  the  whole,  in  places,  the  worst 

253 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

writer  of  the  time  " ;  De  Maupassant's  moral 
sense  was  so  dulled  that  in  his  most  delicate  art 
he  sometimes  gives  his  reader's  normal  instinct 
a  blow  between  the  eyes  without  the  slightest 
consciousness  that  he  has  betrayed  his  defect 
of  insight;  while  Mr.  Pater's  essay  on  *'  Style  " 
is  a  terrible  example  of  the  way  in  which  he 
ought  not  to  have  done  it.  These  subtle  workers 
in  gold,  ivory,  and  clay  have  their  own  place 
and  are  getting  more  perhaps  than  their  share 
of  honor  from  this  generation;  but  those  who 
accept  them  as  the  final  arbiters  of  form,  the 
ultimate  court  of  appeal  in  all  questions  of  style, 
must  make  place  for  the  less  delicate  but  more 
vital  makers  of  imperishable  images;  for  the 
large,  virile,  fecund  natures  who,  from  Homer 
to  Tolstoi,  have  wrought  with  a  certain  careless 
ease  born  of  the  consciousness  of  the  command 
of  inexhaustible  resources.  If  those  lovers  of 
Scott  whose  taste  is  catholic  but  whose  courage 
is  weak  need  the  confirmation  of  the  judgment 
of  the  great,  let  them  take  heart  in  the  compan- 
ionship of  Goethe,  the  first  of  literary  critics,  and 
of  Thackeray,  one  of  the  first  of  literary  artists. 
The  root  of  Scott's  offending  is  the  root  of 
254 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

his  greatness:  he  is  not  literary  in  the  technical 
sense  of  the  word.  There  is  nothing  profes- 
sional about  him;  he  is  primarily  a  Scotch  gen- 
tleman and  landed  proprietor.  He  has  a  nat- 
ural, out-of-doors  way  with  him  which  vitally 
relates  him  to  his  people  and  his  country  and 
makes  him  companionable  to  all  sorts  of  people. 
It  is  not  necessary  to  take  a  special  course  in  the 
history  of  thought  to  understand  him.  He  has 
no  reform  on  his  heart,  save  the  ancient  and  hon- 
orable passion  to  make  the  rules  of  honor  bear 
on  all  men's  consciences  and  to  set  the  ideals  of 
courage  and  courtesy  before  every  man's  eyes. 
He  was  not  bent  on  solving  the  problems  of  his 
time.  He  was  fortunate  enough  to  live  in  a  time 
which  did  not  confuse  fiction  with  psychology. 
He  did  not  write  semi-historical  romances  be- 
cause it  was  easy  and  profitable,  but  because  his 
heart  and  imagination  were  equally  under  the 
spell  of  the  rich  store  of  Scottish  legends  and 
annals.  He  was,  fortunately  for  us,  a  Torj'',  and 
the  French  Revolution  confirmed  his  early  bent. 
He  was,  in  a  word,  in  the  best  possible  attitude 
to  receive  those  elements  out  of  early  and  con- 
temporary life  which  gave  his  genius  wings,  and 

255 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

equipped  him  to  set  the  spectacle  of  life  before 
the  world  as  he  saw  it  through  a  vivacious,  pic- 
torial imagination. 

Scott  was  not  a  subtle  strategist  in  art,  play- 
ing a  deep  game  with  his  readers,  employing 
a  highly  elaborate  technique  to  produce  delicate 
effects  on  a  few  elect  minds ;  he  always  moves  in 
the  open,  masses  his  forces,  and  wins  his  way  by 
mass  and  force.  He  deals  with  those  fundamen- 
tal experiences  which,  being  common  to  all  men, 
are,  by  reason  of  their  universality,  the  most 
inclusive  and  profound  happenings  that  befall 
human  kind;  and  his  manner  has  the  breadth 
and  simplicity  which  are  harmonious  with  his 
themes.  The  great  movements  which  give  color 
and  direction  to  human  affairs  are  neither  set 
in  motion  nor  controlled  by  finesse,  dexterity, 
subtle  suggestion ;  they  have  their  source  in  wide 
stirrings  of  the  conscience  or  of  the  imagination, 
and  find  leadership  in  capacious,  virile  minds. 
Scott  was  entirely  lacking  in  subtlety,  but  sub- 
tlety is  not  depth;  he  was  without  finesse,  but 
finesse  is  not  power.  Depth  he  had  and  power 
in  abundance;  he  was  deep  not  as  the  pools  but 
as  the  ocean,  and  his  power  was  not  that  of 

256 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

delicate  mechanism,  but  of  the  large,  elemental 
forces  of  nature. 

A  man  of  such  broad,  sincere,  sane  genius  as 
Scott  is  always  vitally  related  to  his  people  and 
his  country ;  for  genius  is  a  spiritual  rather  than 
an  intellectual  gift,  and  makes  its  richest  con- 
tribution to  thought  through  divination  rather 
than  by  logical  processes.  As  Homer  divined 
what  lay  in  the  heart  of  his  race,  as  Dante  felt 
even  more  deeply  than  he  understood  the  Spirit 
of  the  Middle  Age,  as  Shakespeare  read  the 
secret  records  which  life  had  written  in  the  spirit 
of  the  race,  so  Scott,  with  less  insight  and  dra- 
matic power,  but  with  kindred  breadth  of  sym- 
pathy, comprehended  his  country  and  people 
and  made  himself  their  foremost  interpreter  and 
historian.  For  Scotland  lives  in  the  books  of 
her  great  romancer  as  she  lives  in  no  work  of 
history.  What  has  happened  to  her  may  be 
read  elsewhere ;  what  has  happened  in  her  must 
be  sought  in  the  Waverley  Novels  and  the  poems 
from  the  same  hand. 

Scott  found  practically  all  his  material  ready 
to  his  hand,  and  so  intimately  is  his  work  asso- 
ciated with  Scottish  scenery,  history,  and  legend 

259 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

that  the  bare  record  of  the  points  of  contact 
would  exceed  the  limits  of  this  comment  on  the 
background  against  which  Rob  Roy,  Di  Vernon, 
Jeanie  Deans,  Claverhouse,  Meg  Merrilies, 
Bonnie  Prince  Charlie,  and  a  host  of  figures 
with  whom  the  English-speaking  peoples  have 
long  lived  on  terms  of  intimacy,  move  and  have 
their  being.  To  place  the  men  and  women 
whom  Scott  created  or  recalled  in  their  local  en- 
vironment one  must  have  at  hand  a  history  and 
a  map  of  Scotland ;  it  must  suffice  here  to  empha- 
size the  importance  of  the  background  as  an  ele- 
ment in  Scott's  work. 

It  is  in  childhood  that  the  intimacies  of  the 
imagination  are  most  easily  established,  and 
nothing  enters  into  the  background  of  an  artist's 
work  until  it  has  been  assimilated  by  the  imagi- 
nation. Familiarity  with  places,  with  outlooks, 
with  the  richest  associations,  does  not  of  itself 
create  the  mood  in  which  a  man  enlarges  the 
horizons  of  his  consciousness  so  to  include  his 
surroundings  that  they  become  part  of  his  un- 
conscious as  well  as  of  his  conscious  life;  to  the 
sense  of  sight  must  be  added  vision ;  to  the  inti- 
macy of  physical  acquaintance  must  be  added 

260 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

the  knowledge  that  comes  with  brooding  over 
enchanting  or  impressive  scenes,  the  meditation 
that  opens  the  heart  of  a  legend.  As  a  boy 
and  youth  Scott  became  first  familiar  and  then 
intimate  with  the  country  and  the  history  of 
Scotland. 

A  great  career  is  always  the  consummation 
of  a  long  course  of  preparation,  and  the  base  of 
Scott's  achievement  was  laid  by  his  ancestry. 
He  came  of  the  right  stock ;  the  blood  of  roman- 
cers ran  in  his  veins.  If  he  had  inlierited  a 
family  memory,  it  would  have  rung  with  the 
shouts  of  ancient  border  warfare,  with  the  cries 
of  the  clans,  with  all  the  tumult  of  Highland 
life.  He  was  kinsman  of  the  Campbells,  the 
Macdonalds,  the  Rutherfords,  the  Hardens,  the 
great  feudal  house  of  Buccleuch.  He  spoke 
humorously  of  the  Scotchman's  respect  for  his 
pedigree  in  the  fragment  of  autobiography,  but 
when  he  built  Abbotsford  he  had  the  armorial 
bearings  of  his  ancestors  emblazoned  on  the 
ceiling  of  the  great  hall.  The  social  importance 
of  his  descent  was  a  minor  matter  compared  with 
its  possible  bequest  to  his  imagination. 

He  was  not  only  born  in  the  ranks  of  the 
261 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

men  of  romance,  but  in  one  of  the  most  roman- 
tic cities  of  the  Old  World.  Always  gray  and 
often  somber  in  the  fogs  and  dim  wintry  twi- 
lights of  the  far  north,  Edinburgh  takes  rank 
with  Florence  and  Venice  among  the  cities  which 
appeal  not  only  to  the  imagination  by  reason  of 
a  history  rich  in  audacity,  in  picturesque  inci- 
dent, and  in  mysterious  tragedy,  but  to  the  eye 
by  reason  of  beauty  of  situation,  nobility  of 
structure,  distinction  of  individuality.  The 
great  commercial  cities,  as  a  rule,  run  out  in 
long  lines  or  spread  themselves  over  vast  level 
areas;  Edinburgh  seems  always  visible  to  the 
eye  in  its  entirety,  so  nobly  do  the  hills  rise  about 
it  crowned  with  castle  and  monument.  One  can 
stand  in  the  heart  of  the  Scottish  capital  and 
see  it  not  only  spread  out  but  rising  about  him 
in  impressive  lines. 

The  city  of  to-day  is  vastly  changed  from 
the  old  town  in  which  the  novelist  was  born  on 
August  15,  1771;  there  are  beautiful  gardens 
and  broad  streets  where  he  may  have  played 
over  open  fields;  but  the  Castle  still  frowns  on 
the  hill  as  in  the  earlier  times,  and  the  street  runs 
precipitously  down  to  St.  Giles  through  lofty 

262 


w 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

buildings  in  which  the  old  wynds  are  still  found ; 
and  Holyrood  sits  amid  the  ruins,  and  Calton 
Hill,  with  the  High  School  on  its  slope  and 
crowned  by  the  unfinished  line  of  Doric  col- 
umns, not  only  adds  a  strikingly  picturesque 
feature  to  the  city,  but  interprets  and  symbol- 
izes its  high  quality  of  intellectual  life,  its  ancient 
and  loyal  devotion  to  learning. 

The  Edinburgh  of  to-day  includes  a  new  city, 
built  up  since  Scott  was  born,  along  the  base  of 
the  old  city.  In  Princes  Street  this  New  Town 
has  the  most  picturesque  thoroughfare  through 
which  the  tides  of  life  ebb  and  flow.  Its  breadth, 
the  solidity  and  harmony  of  the  buildings  that 
line  it  on  one  side,  and  the  beautiful  gardens 
that  give  it  the  freshness  and  charm  of  foliage 
and  sward  on  the  other;  the  great  cliff  rising 
abruptly  beyond,  with  the  Castle  on  the  summit, 
the  impressive  monuments  and  public  buildings, 
impart  to  modern  Edinburgh  a  dignity  and  dis- 
tinction entirely  its  own. 

The  New  Town  and  Scott  were  born  about 
the  same  time,  but  the  associations  of  his  youth 
center  in  the  picturesque  Old  Town.  Here, 
as  everywhere  in  this  irreverent  modem  world 

265 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

intent  on  convenience  and  not  scrupulous  about 
landmarks,  radical  changes  have  been  made 
since  1771;  but  High  Street  still  runs  its  steep 
course  from  the  Castle  to  St.  Giles,  and  there, 
of  a  Sunday  morning,  the  swirl  of  the  pipes  is 
still  heard  as  the  Highlanders  come  swinging 
down,  with  flying  tartans,  to  the  military  ser- 
vice. "  A  sloping  high  street  and  many  side 
lanes,  covering  like  some  wrought  tissue  of  stone 
and  mortar,  like  some  rhinoceros  skin,  with 
many  a  gnarled  embossment,  church  steeple, 
chimney  head,  Tolbooth  and  other  ornament  or 
indispensability,  back  and  ribs  of  the  slope  " 
— to  recall  Carljde's  description  of  the  place  as 
he  saw  it  in  his  youth. 

Many  destructive  changes  had  already  been 
made,  but  then  as  now  the  conformation  and 
character  of  the  town  are  clearlj^  discernible. 
The  narrow  thoroughfares,  the  lofty  stone  build- 
ings, the  dark  closes,  the  crowding  of  the  popula- 
tion on  the  ridge  of  the  great  rock,  made  old 
Edinburgh  an  extension  of  its  Castle.  A  rock 
of  refuge  and  a  place  of  defense,  with  the  Cas- 
tle at  one  end  and  the  Abbey  at  the  other,  it  was 
proudly  defiant  of  the  Highlands  to  the  north 

266 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

whence  bands  of  ravagers  descended  and  swept 
the  land  as  the  Norsemen  the  shores  of  France 
in  the  days  before  Rollo,  and  of  the  Border  on 
the  south,  full  of  unrest  and  turbulence. 

If  the  enchantments  of  the  Middle  Age  did  not 
invest  the  Edinburgh  into  which  Scott  was  born, 
the  wild,  romantic  history  of  centuries  of  strug- 
gle had  left  their  records  on  every  side.  It  was 
a  veritable  citadel  of  ancient  tradition ;  nowhere 
else  in  Europe  are  population  and  historical 
association  more  congested.  The  old  fifteen- 
story  buildings,  the  forerunners  of  the  great 
business  structures  of  to-day,  have  disappeared, 
but  ten  stories  still  tow  er  above  the  narrow  closes 
and  wynds,  and  armorial  bearings,  antique  door- 
handles, link-extinguishers,  carven  finials,  half- 
erased  dates  and  inscriptions,  are  still  to  be 
found.  Foul  with  the  surviving  odors  of  the 
evil-smelling  Middle  Age,  full  of  squalor  re- 
deemed by  touches  of  splendor,  dark  and 
gloomy  but  rich  in  haunting  memories,  the 
city  which  held  in  its  heart  St.  Giles  and  the 
Old  Tolbooth— the  "  Heart  of  Midlothian  "— 
was  a  veritable  fairyland  to  a  boy  of  Scott's  pic- 
torial imagination.    Born  of  an  ancestry  which 

267 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

included  the  "  Bould  Rutherfords  that  were  sae 
stout,"  William  Boltfoot  of  Harden,  always  the 
first  "  to  tak  the  foord,"  the  "  Flower  of  Yar- 
row," whose  sweetness  lives  in  song,  it  was 
Scott's  great  good  fortune  to  open  his  eyes  on  a 
world  which  preserved  the  records  of  the  age 
of  which  he  was  to  be  the  chief  recorder,  to 
store  his  memory  and  stimulate  his  imagination 
in  those  sensitive  years  in  which  a  man  instinc- 
tively reaches  after  the  things  which  belong  to 
his  temperament  and  genius,  and  takes  them  to 
himself  without  knowing  that  he  is  making 
ready  for  his  work. 

The  son  of  a  "  Writer  to  the  Signet,"  with 
a  fondness  for  "  analyzing  the  abstruse  feudal 
doctrines  connected  with  conveyancing,"  Scott 
was  born  not  far  from  the  heart  of  the  Old 
Town,  in  a  house  which  stood  at  the  head 
of  College  Wynd,  then  a  fashionable  quarter. 
Here  Oliver  Goldsmith  had  once  lived  in  the 
days  of  his  study  at  the  University,  and  through 
this  street  in  Scott's  infancy  Boswell  conducted 
Dr.  Johnson  to  the  University.  The  house  in 
which  the  senior  Walter  Scott  lived  was  pulled 
down  to  make  room  for  the  present  University 

268 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

building,  which  was  begun  in  1789  and  com- 
pleted nearly  half  a  century  later. 

The  death  of  six  children  in  rapid  succession 
gave  ground  for  the  suspicion  that  College 
Wynd  was  not  a  wholesome  locality,  and  shortly 
after  the  birth  of  the  future  novelist  the  family 
removed  to  George's  Square,  a  more  open  sec- 
tion of  the  town,  of  which  Lord  Cockburn 
writes:  "With  its  pleasant,  trim-kept  gardens, 
it  has  an  air  of  antiquated  grandeur  about  it, 
and  retains  not  a  few  traces  of  its  former  dig- 
nity and  seclusion."  Here,  in  a  neighborhood 
crowded  with  historical  and  literary  associations 
and  memories,  Walter  Scott  lived  during  his 
boyhood  and  youth  and  well  on  into  his  early 
manhood.  He  could  not  walk  the  few  squares 
to  his  first  school  in  Bristo  Street,  or,  later,  to 
the  high,  narrow  building  in  the  High  School 
Yards,  or,  still  later,  to  the  "  Town's  College," 
as  the  University  was  called,  without  being  as- 
sailed from  every  quarter  by  the  memories  of 
great  men  or  of  those  great  events  which  wait 
upon  great  men. 

Before  he  was  two  years  old,  Scott  lost  the 
use  of  his  right  leg,  as  the  result  of  an  illness, 

271 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

in  a  way  that  baffled  the  skill  of  the  physicians, 
and  was  sent  to  his  grandfather's  farm,  Sandy- 
Knowe,  in  order  to  secure  better  and  freer  condi- 
tions. The  village  of  Smailholm,  in  Roxburgh- 
shire, was  then  a  small  hamlet,  in  that  Scottish 
Border,  of  which  the  poet  and  romancer  took 
such  complete  possession  by  the  power  of  his 
imagination  that  it  has  become  "  the  Scott 
Country"  for  all  time:  the  home  of  romance 
and  poetry,  through  which  the  Tweed  flows, 
dear  to  all  the  world  because  its  murmur  was 
music  in  the  ears  of  the  broken  but  heroic  man 
who  came  home  to  Abbotsford  to  die  in  1832. 

Smailholm  lies  on  a  ridge  and  commands  a 
wide  landscape  to  the  Cheviot  Hills  and  the 
slopes  of  Lammermoor.  In  the  simple  farm- 
house the  *'  puir  lame  laddie "  was  tenderly 
watched  over,  and  there  he  heard  for  the  first 
time,  with  conscious  interest,  those  stories  of 
daring  and  of  achievement  which  were  to  form 
the  richest  material  of  his  education.  In  a  vol- 
ume of  Ramsay's  "  Tea  Table  Miscellany  "  in 
the  library  at  Abbotsford  he  wrote:  "  This  book 
belonged  to  my  grandfather,  Robert  Scott,  and 
out  of  it  I  was  taught  *  Hardy  Knute  '  by  heart 

272 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

long  before  I  could  read  the  ballad  myself.  It 
was  the  first  poem  I  ever  learned — the  last  I 
shall  ever  forget." 

The  countryside  was  rich  in  romantic  as- 
sociation, and  the  list  of  its  localities  to-day 
reads  like  a  resume  of  Scott's  life  and  work. 
Mertown's  Halls;  the  Brethren  Stanes;  Dry- 
burgh,  where  Scott  and  Lockhart  sleep  to- 
gether in  one  of  those  burial-places  the  very  love- 
liness of  which  is  a  symbol  of  immortality;  the 
landmarks  of  Yarrow  and  Ettrick;  the  peaks 
of  Peeblesshire;  the  crags  of  Hume;  the  vale 
of  the  Gala;  "such  were  the  objects,"  writes 
Lockhart,  "  that  had  painted  the  earliest  images 
on  the  eye  of  the  last  and  greatest  of  the  Border 
Minstrels." 

It  was  in  the  farm-house  at  Smailholm  that 
Scott  first  became  conscious  that  he  was  in  the 
world  and  a  very  considerable  part  of  it,  and 
one  of  his  earliest  recollections  was  lying  on  the 
floor  of  the  little  parlor,  "  stripped  and  swathed 
up  in  a  sheepskin,  wai-m  as  it  was  flayed  from 
the  carcass  of  the  animal."  The  child's  grand- 
mother was  a  repository  of  Scottish  legend  and 
tradition,  in  whose  youth  the  stories  of  the  Bor- 

273 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

der  depredations  were  matters  of  comparatively 
recent  history.  She  told  him  many  a  tale  of 
Watt  of  Harden,  Jamie  Telf  er  of  the  Fair  Dod- 
head,  and  heroes  of  kindred  spirit — "  merry 
men  all,  of  the  persuasion  and  calling  of  Robin 
Hood  and  Little  John."  A  very  pretty  picture 
of  Scott  at  this  earliest  period  remains  in  the 
record  of  an  acquaintance  of  the  grandparents : 
"  Old  Mrs.  Scott  sitting,  with  her  spinning- 
vrheel,  at  one  side  of  the  fire,  in  a  clean,  clean 
parlor;  the  grandfather,  a  good  deal  failed,  in 
his  elbow-chair  opposite ;  and  the  little  boy  lying 
on  the  carpet  at  the  old  man's  feet,  listening  to 
the  Bible,  or  whatever  good  book  Miss  Jennie 
was  reading  to  them."  Miss  Jennie  was  one  of 
those  invaluable  aunts  whose  happy  fortune  it 
is  to  read  fairy  stories  to  children  and  to  be  al- 
ways touched  with  the  glow  of  romance  which 
streams  from  their  fascinating  pages. 

In  his  fourth  year  the  boy  was  taken  to  Bath 
in  pursuit  of  strength.  He  had  gained  greatly 
in  general  vigor,  and  his  life  was  probably  saved 
by  the  prompt  and  thorough  measures  taken  by 
his  father.  He  had  lived  largely  in  the  open 
air,  and  those  fine  days  when  he  was  carried  out 

274 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

and  laid  on  the  rocks  by  the  old  shepherd  while 
the  sheep  browsed  around  them  had  invigorated 
his  body  while  they  nourished  his  imagination. 
He  now  became  a  sturdy  child,  with  a  slight  limp, 
but  able  to  share  to  the  full  the  pleasures  of 
exercise  and  of  sport.  In  London  he  saw  the 
Tower  and  Westminster  Abbey,  but  the  chief 
incident  of  this  first  journey  and  residence  in 
England  was  a  night  at  the  theater,  where  he 
saw  "As  You  Like  It."  Years  afterward  he 
wrote  that  the  witchery  of  the  whole  scene  was 
still  alive  in  his  mind ;  and  he  remembered  being 
so  much  scandalized  at  the  quarrel  between  Or- 
lando and  his  brother  in  the  first  scene  that  he 
cried  out,  "  A'n't  they  brothers?  "  Later  he  re- 
called with  pleasure  the  Parade  in  Bath,  with 
the  winding  Avon,  the  lowing  of  cattle  on  the 
opposite  hills,  and  the  splendors  of  a  certain 
shop  in  the  town.  He  was  afflicted  at  this  time 
by  a  superstitious  fear  of  statuary,  and  was 
cured  of  this  failing  by  familiarity  with  a  statue 
of  Neptune  which  stood  beside  the  river. 

There  were  rapid  changes  of  place  in  the 
search  for  health  during  the  next  few  months, 
and  the  boy's  time  was  unevenly  divided  between 

277 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

Edinburgh,  Sandy-Knowe,  and  Prestonpans. 
It  was  at  this  time  that  an  accomplished  lady, 
after  spending  a  night  in  the  home  in  George's 
Square,  wrote  these  prophetic  words  to  a  friend 
the  following  day:  "  I  last  night  supped  in  Mr. 
Walter  Scott's.  He  has  the  most  extraordinary 
genius  of  a  boy  I  ever  saw.  He  was  reading  a 
poem  to  his  mother  when  I  went  in.  I  made 
him  read  on;  it  was  the  description  of  a  ship- 
wreck. His  passion  rose  with  the  storm.  He 
lifted  his  eyes  and  hands.  '  There's  the  mast 
gone,'  says  he;  '  crash  it  goes! — they  all  perish! ' 
After  his  agitation  he  turns  to  me.  '  That  is 
too  melancholy,'  says  he ;  '  I  had  better  read  you 
something  more  amusing.'  I  preferred  a  little 
chat,  and  asked  his  opinion  of  Milton  and  other 
books  he  was  reading,  which  he  gave  me  wonder- 
fully." At  Prestonpans  he  had  the  good  for- 
tune to  make  the  acquaintance  of  a  veteran  who 
was  resting  in  the  village  on  half-pay  after  his 
campaigns,  and  who  found  in  the  boy  an  eager 
and  patient  listener,  with  an  insatiable  appetite 
for  tales  of  adventure  and  descriptions  of  mili- 
tary feats. 

After  a  short  attendance  at  a  private  school 
278 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

in  Edinburgh,  and,  later,  instruction  at  the 
hands  of  a  tutor,  Scott's  formal  education  was 
begun  in  the  High  School,  where  he  describes 
himself  as  popular  by  reason  of  his  good  nature 
and  ready  imagination,  but  much  given  to  fri- 
volity and  neglect  of  study.  He  had  already 
begun  to  write  verses,  chiefly  remarkable,  as 
youthful  verses  often  are,  for  piety  and  lack  of 
inspiration : 

ON    A    THUNDER-STORM 

Loud  o'er  my  head  though  awful  thunders  roll, 
And  vivid  lightnings  flash  from  pole  to  pole. 
Yet  't  is  thy  voice,  my  God,  that  bids  them  fly. 
Thy  arm  directs  those  lightnings  through  the  sky ; 
Then  let  the  good  thy  mighty  name  revere. 
And  hardened  sinners  thy  just  vengeance  fear. 

This  didactic  mood,  so  normal  in  an  unde- 
veloped boy,  was  humanized  by  wholesome  ac- 
tivity; for  Scott  was  "  more  distinguished  in  the 
j^ards  than  in  the  class."  The  boy  had  early  re- 
solved not  to  let  his  lameness  stand  in  the  way 
of  a  free  and  vigorous  physical  life,  and  before 
he  left  the  High  School  he  had  become  one  of 
the  boldest  and  surest-footed  climbers  of  "  the 

279 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

kittle  nine  stanes,"  a  perilous  passage  on  the 
face  of  the  Castle  rock. 

The  interval  between  leaving  the  High  School 
and  entering  the  University  was  spent  with  the 
aunt  who  had  already  had  so  large  a  place  in 
his  vital  education,  in  a  cottage  at  Kelso.  He 
was  then  twelve  years  old,  and  at  the  age  when 
the  imagination  is  most  easily  stirred  and  im- 
pressed. His  surroundings  during  those  im- 
pressionable months  left  ineffaceable  images  in 
his  memory,  and  had  no  small  place  in  his  prepa- 
ration for  his  work.  He  described  Kelso  as  the 
"  most  beautiful  if  not  the  most  romantic  vil- 
lage in  Scotland,  presenting  objects  not  only 
grand  in  themselves,  but  venerable  for  their  as- 
sociations." The  cottage  stood  in  a  garden,  with 
long  paths  between  hedges  of  yew  and  horn- 
beam; there  were  thickets  of  flowering  shrubs, 
a  bower,  and  an  arbor  accessible  only  through 
a  labyrinth.  Chief  among  the  trees  of  the  gar- 
den was  a  great  platanus  under  which  the  boy 
took  a  long  leap  in  his  education  when  "  Percy's 
Reliques  "  fell  into  his  hands  for  the  first  time. 
He  attended  the  Grammar  School  at  Kelso  dur- 
ing this  period,  but  his  real  teacher  was  the 

280 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

noble  country  about  him,  through  which  he 
walked  with  the  energy  of  an  explorer  and  the 
joy  of  a  poet.  Two  rivers,  beautiful  in  them- 
selves and  flowing  out  of  the  fairyland  of  Scot- 
tish song  and  story, — the  Tweed  and  the  Teviot, 
— were  close  at  hand;  ancient  and  picturesque 
ruins  were  within  reach.  He  was  fast  coming 
to  his  own,  though  he  did  not  know  it  until  years 
later,  and  he  was  instinctively  taking  to  himself 
the  stuff  of  life  in  nature  and  books  which  was 
to  enrich  his  spirit  and  give  his  genius  strength 
of  wing. 

He  found  the  most  fascinating  and,  in  a  way, 
the  most  liberating  of  all  his  text-books  in  the 
Kelso  library,  and  read  them  out-of-doors  in 
the  shade  of  a  plane-tree.  "  I  remember  well 
the  spot,"  he  wrote  later,  "  where  I  read  those 
volumes  for  the  first  time.  It  was  beneath  a 
huge  platanus,  in  the  ruins  of  what  had  been 
intended  for  an  old-fashioned  arbor  in  the  gar- 
den I  have  mentioned.  The  summer  day  sped 
onward  so  fast  that,  notwithstanding  the  sharp 
appetite  of  thirteen,  I  forgot  the  hour  of  dinner, 
was  sought  for  with  anxiety,  and  was  still  found 
entranced  in  my  intellectual  banquet.    To  read, 

283 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

to  remember,  was  in  this  instance  the  same  thing, 
and  henceforth  I  overwhehned  my  school-fel- 
lows, and  all  who  would  hearken  to  me,  with 
tragical  recitations  from  the  ballads  of  Bishop 
Percy.  The  first  time,  too,  I  could  scrape  a  few 
shillings  together,  which  were  not  common  oc- 
currences with  me,  I  bought  unto  myself  a  copy 
of  these  beloved  volumes ;  nor  do  I  believe  I  ever 
read  a  book  half  so  frequently  or  with  half  the 
enthusiasm."  This  was  perhaps  the  most  sig- 
nificant moment  in  Scott's  education,  as  was  the 
reading  of  Spenser's  "  Faerie  Queene  "  in  the 
education  of  Keats. 

James  Ballantyne,  whose  acquaintance,  made 
at  this  time,  was  probably  the  most  momentous 
happening  in  his  external  life,  tells  us  that  dur- 
ing this  period  Scott  was  devoted  to  antiquarian 
lore  and  was  the  best  story-teller  he  ever  knew. 
"  He  soon  discovered  that  I  was  as  fond  of  lis- 
tening as  he  himself  was  of  relating;  and  I  re- 
member it  was  a  thing  of  daily  occurrence  that, 
after  he  had  made  himself  master  of  his  own 
lesson,  I,  alas,  being  still  sadly  to  seek  in  mine, 
he  used  to  whisper  to  me,  '  Come,  slink  over  be- 
side me,  Jamie,  and  I  '11  tell  you  a  story.'  "  And 

284 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

Scott  has  been  inviting  the  world  for  eighty 
years  to  sit  beside  him  and  hsten,  and  the  magic 
is  still  potent. 

He  has  left  a  very  definite  report  of  the  deep 
joy  which  entered  his  soul  in  those  days  of  his 
dawning  intellectual  life,  the  glow  of  his  imag- 
ination, under  the  spell  of  the  beauty  of  the  Bor- 
der and  of  its  romantic  associations.  From  this 
time  the  love  of  natural  beauty,  especially  when 
associated  with  ancient  splendor,  became  a  pas- 
sion with  him. 

In  November,  1783,  Scott  entered  the  Hu- 
manity and  Greek  classes  in  the  University  of 
Edinburgh ;  but  these  formal  studies  did  not  in- 
terrupt the  education  Avhich,  by  the  instinct  of 
genius,  he  had  marked  out  for  himself.  Every 
Saturday,  and  more  frequently  during  vaca- 
tions, he  was  in  the  habit  of  climbing  Salisbury 
Crags,  Arthur's  Seat,  or  Blackford  Hill,  with 
a  bundle  of  books  from  the  circulating  library; 
and  in  the  silence  and  solitude  of  the  summit, 
Edinburgh  at  their  feet,  the  Firth  in  the  dis- 
tance, the  bluebells  about  them,  and  the  shadows 
resting  on  the  Pentland  hills,  these  boys  read  to- 
gether Spenser,  Ariosto,  Boiardo,  and  the  other 

285 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

masters  of  the  romantic  mood.  This  habit,  kept 
up  for  several  years,  made  Scott  so  familiar  with 
stories  of  knight-errantry  and  of  romantic  love 
and  adventure  that  he  could  recite  them  from 
memory  by  the  hour.  In  this  extra-university 
fashion,  after  the  manner  of  boys  of  talent  since 
colleges  began,  Scott  learned  Italian  until  he 
could  read  it  with  ease,  and  began  a  collection  of 
ballads  of  which  six  volumes  are  preserved  in 
the  library  at  Abbotsford.  He  learned  enough 
Sjianish  to  read  and  enjoy  "  Don  Quixote." 
Pulci,  the  Decameron,  Brantome,  he  knew;  and 
Froissart,  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  say,  he  had 
at  his  fingers'  ends.  He  fastened  like  a  tiger, 
he  tells  us,  on  any  collection  of  old  songs  and 
romances  that  came  in  his  way.  Of  his  intel- 
lectual interests  and  occupations  at  this  period 
he  probably  gives  a  faithful  account  in  "  Wa- 
verley  " :  "  In  English  literature,  he  was  mas- 
ter of  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  of  our  earlier 
dramatic  authors,  of  many  picturesque  and 
interesting  passages  from  our  old  historical 
chronicles,  and  was  particularly  well  acquainted 
with  Spenser,  Drayton,  and  other  poets,  who 
liave  exercised  themselves  on  romantic  fiction, — 
of  all  themes  the  most  fascinating  to  a  youthful 

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7\ 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

imagination,  before  the  passions  have  roused 
themselves  and  demand  poetry  of  a  more  senti- 
mental description."  James  Sibbald's  circulat- 
ing library  in  the  Parliament  Square  had  more 
to  do  with  Scott's  education,  it  may  be  suspected, 
than  the  University ;  and  what  the  library  could 
not  teach  he  learned  on  the  Tweedside  and  in 
the  Highlands. 

The  details  of  Scott's  career  at  the  Bar,  as  a 
translator,  editor,  poet,  and,  finally,  as  a  novelist, 
would  be  out  of  place  in  this  endeavor  to  bring 
into  clear  relief  the  background  of  his  work  bj' 
showing  the  great  part  which  it  played  in  his 
education.  Notwithstanding  his  lameness,  he 
was  one  of  the  most  active  men  of  his  time  in 
most  forms  of  exercise.  During  his  High  School 
and  University  days  he  came  to  know  the  coun- 
try about  Edinburgh  by  heart,  in  numberless 
long  walks.  Later  he  wandered  farther  afield 
on  foot  or  on  horseback,  and  his  father  began 
to  protest  that  he  was  becoming  a  strolling- 
peddler.  His  principal  object  in  these  long 
excursions,  he  tells  us,  was  the  pleasure  of 
seeing  romantic  scenery  and  of  visiting  localities 
associated  with  historical  events. 

Wandering  over  the  battle-field  of  Bannock- 
289 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

burn  gave  him  deeper  delight  than  the  noble 
view  from  the  walls  of  Stirling  Castle,  not  be- 
cause the  sweep  of  that  great  landscape  did  not 
appeal  to  him,  but  because  his  interest  in  all  his- 
torical memorials  was  so  keen  and  his  genius  for 
discovering  their  significance  so  great.  "  Show 
me  an  old  castle  or  a  battle-field  and  I  was  at 
home  at  once,  filled  it  with  its  combatants  in  their 
proper  costume,  and  overwhelmed  my  hearers 
by  the  enthusiasm  of  my  description."  Such 
glimpses  into  Scott's  mind  bring  into  clear  light 
the  sincerity  and  integrity  of  his  selection  of 
his  material.  The  age  and  genius  of  chivalry, 
the  habit  and  costume  of  feudalism,  were  as  real 
and  vital  to  him  as  were  the  standards  and  man- 
ners of  the  society  in  which  Becky  Sharp  lived 
to  Thackeray,  or  as  the  "  form  and  pressure  " 
of  the  life  of  the  hour  is  to  the  most  uncom- 
promising of  contemporary  realists. 

Scott's  acquaintance  with  the  Border  was 
intimate  and  began  with  his  earliest  childhood; 
his  knowledge  of  the  Highlands  probably  dates 
from  his  fifteenth  year.  His  first  excursion  into 
a  region  which  was  still  distant  and  wild  was 
made  in  the  autumn  of  1786  or  1787,  as  the  guest 

290 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

of  an  ardent  Jacobite  of  Invernahyde,  who  had 
taken  part  in  the  risings  of  1715  and  1745,  whose 
loyalty  to  the  exiled  house  of  Scotland  was  a 
steady  flame,  and  who,  in  his  old  age,  cherished 
the  hope  of  drawing  his  claymore  once  more  be- 
fore he  died.  Never  was  a  writer  of  romantic 
temper  more  fortunate  than  was  Scott  on  this 
memorable  visit  to  the  section  whose  tragic  story 
he  was  to  write  with  inimitable  pathos  and  humor. 
It  was  a  true  journey  of  discovery;  a  veritable 
conquest  of  the  imagination.  When  the  vale 
of  Perth  first  opened  before  him,  he  tells  us  that 
he  pulled  up  the  reins  without  meaning  to  do 
so  and  gazed  on  the  scene  as  if  he  were  afraid  it 
would  shift,  like  the  scenes  in  a  theater,  before  he 
could  distinctly  observe  its  different  parts,  or 
convince  himself  that  what  he  saw  was  real. 

But  still  deeper  was  the  delight  with  which 
he  listened  to  the  stories  of  his  enthusiastic  host, 
who  was  not  only  the  custodian  of  the  history 
and  legends  of  the  Highlands,  but  the  incarna- 
tion of  the  intrepid  and  romantic  temper  of  the 
Highlander.  From  the  lips  of  this  veteran  of 
the  last  heroic  stand  for  a  lost  cause  and  a  fallen 
house  in  Scotland  the  future  author  of  "  Wa- 

291 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

verley  "  and  "  Rob  Roy  "  listened  spellbound 
to  the  moving  tale  of  the  campaigns  with  Mar 
and  Charles  Edward;  of  his  hiding  in  a  rocky 
cave  not  far  from  his  own  house,  which  was  in 
the  hands  of  English  troops,  after  the  battle  of 
CuUoden ;  of  his  broadsword  duel  with  Rob  Roy ; 
of  a  hundred  other  incidents  which  fired  the 
boy's  heart  and  stored  his  memory  with  roman- 
tic material. 

Year  after  year  these  expeditions  into  the 
wilder  parts  of  Scotland  were  repeated,  until 
Scott  came  to  have  not  only  complete  knowledge 
of  the  topography  of  the  Highlands  and  of  the 
coast,  but  to  carry  in  his  mind  a  kind  of  histori- 
cal and  legendary  map  of  Scotland  in  which  all 
the  centers  of  story  and  points  of  interest  in 
the  Border  and  the  Highlands  were  distinctly 
marked. 

His  first  sight  of  Loch  Katrine,  which  he  was 
to  endear  to  the  whole  world,  was  gained  under 
military  escort,  while  he  was  a  writer's  appren- 
tice and  on  legal  business,  the  little  cavalcade 
being  in  charge  of  a  sergeant  who  was  a  reposi- 
tory of  local  traditions.  These  raids,  as  Scott 
called  them,  gave  him  acquaintance  not  only 

292 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

with  the  country  but  with  people  of  every  rank 
and  condition,  and  with  the  rich  fund  of  song 
and  story  that  floated  about  Scotland  from 
vale  to  vale  and  from  farthest  Sutherlandshire 
to  the  English  border.  To  know  men  who  had 
known  Rob  Roy,  to  hear  the  story  of  the  two 
risings  which  had  shaken  Scotland  like  an  earth- 
quake, to  be  a  guest  in  remote  and  lonely  castles, 
to  be  guided  through  wild  defiles  and  over  vast 
mountain  ranges  by  kilted  clansmen  whose  only 
speech  was  Gaelic  and  whose  claymores  were 
still  at  the  service  of  their  chiefs — this  was  the 
real  education  of  the  writer  who  was  to  be  the 
scribe  of  his  country,  the  truest  of  her  historians. 
He  had  taken  the  hand  of  the  man  who  sent 
the  fiery  cross  through  Appin  before  the  last 
and  most  tragic  pouring  out  of  fanatical  loyalty 
in  the  Highlands;  he  had  a  portrait  of  Prince 
Charles,  purchased  by  some  of  his  earliest  sav- 
ings; there  was  still  a  "  king  over  the  sea,"  and 
many  were  the  glasses  that  were  dashed  to  the 
floor  after  his  health  had  been  drunk  in  Scottish 
castles  and  homes;  the  heroic  age  was  still  so 
near  that  its  glow  had  not  faded  from  the  im- 
agination:  surely  no  poet  and  romancer  was 

293 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

more  fortunately  born  than  the  author  of  "  The 
Lady  of  the  Lake  "  and  of  the  romances  which 
bear  on  their  title-pages  the  name  of  Walter 
Scott! 

The  Highlands  had  a  large  place  in  Scott's 
imagination,  as  they  have  in  his  novels,  but  his 
heart  was  in  the  Border,  and  Ruskin  was  well 
within  the  truth  when  he  wrote:  "  Scott's  life 
was,  in  all  the  joyful  strength  of  it,  spent  in  the 
valley  of  the  Tweed.  Rosebank,  in  the  Lower 
Tweed,  gave  him  his  close  knowledge  of  the 
district  of  Flodden  Field,  and  his  store  of  foot- 
traveler's  interest  in  every  glen  of  Ettrick,  Yar- 
row, and  Liddel  Water."  Smailholm  and  Kelso 
were  among  his  earliest  homes,  and  when  he 
chose  the  place  which  of  all  others  appealed  to 
him  most  he  turned  instinctively  to  the  banks 
of  the  Tweed. 

Scott  saw  Abbotsford  in  his  mind's  eye  long 
before  the  first  stone  had  been  laid.  Not  far 
from  the  place  where  the  house  stands  the  last 
of  the  great  battles  between  the  clans  was  fought 
in  1526,  and  the  elder  Walter  Scott  went  over 
the  ground  with  the  future  Laird  when  the  lat- 
ter was  still  a  boy.    In  1811  the  boy,  become  a 

296 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

man  of  distinction  and  considerable  fortune, 
purchased  the  farm  property  of  Cartleyhole, 
with  a  small  house  fast  going  to  decay.  No 
place  could  have  offered  more,  however,  to  the 
man  who  saw  the  localit}^  not  only  with  his  eyes 
but  with  his  imagination.  The  Tweed  flowed 
through  the  very  heart  of  the  landscape,  gentle 
hills  gathered  about  it,  the  glens  of  Ettrick  and 
Yarrow  were  within  reach,  and  Melrose  and 
Dryburgh  were  not  distant. 

To-day  the  whole  region  seems  like  a  page  in 
the  life  of  the  builder  of  Abbotsford;  but  dur- 
ing the  first  years  of  his  ownership  the  most 
unambitious  designs  were  in  his  mind.  In  1812 
he  wrote  to  Byron:  "  I  am  laboring  here  to  con- 
tradict an  old  proverb,  and  make  a  silk  purse 
out  of  a  sow's  ear,  namely,  to  convert  a  bare 
hough  and  brae  into  a  comfortable  farm."  In 
thirteen  years  the  cottage  became  a  castle  and 
the  farm  an  estate ;  and  this  transformation  had 
involved  the  expenditure  of  great  sums  of 
money.  At  Christmas  in  1824  the  completion 
of  the  castle  was  celebrated  by  a  great  house- 
warming. 

For  a  time  Scott  was  supremely  happy;  he 
297 


THE   LAND   OF   SCOTT 

had  a  noble  estate  in  the  lieart  of  the  countiy 
he  loved ;  his  house  was  a- museum  of  antiquarian 
objects;  he  had  a  fine  library;  guests  came  and 
went  in  long  procession.  Into  the  house,  as  into 
everything  to  which  he  set  his  hand,  Scott  put 
his  heart;  it  was  the  expression  of  all  the  mani- 
fold interests  of  his  life:  "  Abbotsf ord  was 
reared  on  no  set  plan,  but  with  the  desire  to  re- 
produce some  of  those  features  of  ancient  Scot- 
tish architecture  which  Scott  most  venerated. 
It  was  at  once  a  monument  of  the  high  histori- 
cal imagination  from  which  sprang  his  more 
enduring  memorial,  and  of  the  over-zeal  which 
may  be  lavished,  with  very  disastrous  results, 
on  the  mere  '  pomp  and  circumstance  of  time ' 
— the  all-absorbing  passion 

"  To  call  this  wooded  patch  of  earth  his  own, 
And  rear  the  pile  of  ill-assorted  stone, 
And  play  the  grand  old  feudal  lord  again." 

In  the  dining-room  he  hung  the  portraits  of 
his  ancestors,  and  there,  on  a  quiet  autumn  after- 
noon in  1832,  the  brave  struggle  over,  the  end 
came:  "  A  beautiful  day,  so  warm  that  my  win- 
dow was  wide  open,  and  so  perfectly  still  that 

298 


M 

G- 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

the  sound  of  all  others  most  delicious  to  his  ear — 
the  gentle  ripple  of  the  Tweed  over  its  pebbles — 
was  distinctly  audible  as  we  knelt  around  the 
bed,  and  his  eldest  son  kissed  and  closed  his 
eyes."  From  that  sacred  place  and  scene  came 
a  word  which  the  world  will  never  forget — the 
last  word  to  Lockhart :  "  Be  a  good  man,  my 
dear." 

It  has  been  charged  against  Scott,  in  the  years 
of  reaction  against  the  romantic  spirit  in  fiction, 
that  he  is  the  painter  of  the  life  and  manners  of 
Feudalism,  and  therefore  a  dealer  in  fictitious 
values,  a  vender  of  obsolete  wares.  But  nothing 
that  was  once  real  and  vital  is  ever  less  than  real 
and  vital  to  the  genius  that  penetrates  to  its 
heart  and  revitalizes  it.  In  this  sense  "  Quen- 
tin  Durward "  is  as  genuine  and  sincere  as 
"  Vanity  Fair  "  or  "  Eugenie  Grandet."  Shake- 
speare is  a  better  historian  of  Cleopatra,  if  the 
chief  function  of  history  is  to  make  the  dead 
live  again,  than  Plutarch;  and  Scott  is  not  to 
be  counted  less  authoritative  because  he  was  a  re- 
corder of  life  after  the  fact  instead  of  contem- 
poraneous with  it.  Xor  must  it  be  forgotten 
that  it  was  the  soul  of  Feudalism  which  appealed 

301 


THE   LAND   OF    SCOTT 

to  his  imagination ;  "  the  spirit  of  chivalry,  by 
which,  as  by  a  vivifying  soul,  that  system  was 
animated,"  "  founded  on  generosity  and  self- 
denial." 

But  Scott's  absorption  in  feudalism  has  been 
greatly  exaggerated;  he  was  the  delineator  of 
chivalry  in  only  three  or  four  stories;  in  the 
great  body  of  his  work  he  was  the  recorder  and 
interpreter  of  Scotland.  In  those  romances 
Scotland  lives  in  scores  of  men  and  women  who 
are  blood  of  her  blood  and  bone  of  her  bone.  To 
recall  these  romances  is  to  summon  those  fair 
apparitions  in  w^hom  the  pathos  and  tragedy 
of  Scottish  life  are  preserved  against  the  touch 
of  time:  Jeanie  and  Effie  Deans,  Bessie  Mac- 
lure,  Di  Vernon,  INIarie  Stuart,  Flora  Maclvor, 
Lucy  Ashton.  In  those  pages  live  and  move  a 
long  line  of  kings,  gypsies,  lawyers,  preachers, 
judges,  soldiers,  farmers;  men  of  the  Border 
and  of  the  Highlands,  who  not  only  keep  for  us 
the  features  of  a  past  age,  but  reveal  to  us  the 
secret  of  the  heroism,  the  prodigal  loyalt}%  the 
dour  ruggedness,  and  the  deep  tenderness  which 
have  made  Scotland  the  home  of  poetry  and 
romance. 

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